Evergreen Falls (41 page)

“You want her money?”

“No. Never have. I want her name. Frankly, that’s the only thing about her that interests me. I’d rather it wasn’t tainted by the stupid death of a stupid boy who didn’t know when to stop.”

Violet tried to wrap her mind around what they were saying. Surely they were speaking hypothetically. Sam wasn’t dead. Sam was better. She had made him better. She leaned against the wall, unsure whether to march in and demand clarification, or keep listening for the explanation that undid it all, that made sense of the previous frightening conversation.

“So, if they find his body . . .”

“Will they? It’s down in the valley somewhere, a long way down. Past all the bush tracks. Nobody’s going to find it.”

“Oh, God,” she murmured. “Oh, God, no.” She hadn’t got the medicine to him in time. It was Flora’s fault! She should have let Violet in! She should have got him help earlier!

“So we’ve dumped his body and now he just disappears?”

“It’s better . . . easier that way. We’ll say he went out walking and just didn’t come back. Flora will be happier, too, in the long run, though she may not know it yet. She was very fond of the lad. I’ve never seen her so distressed.”

Violet began to shake, unable to control her limbs. The tea tray jumped from her hands and smashed onto the floor. The sound seemed deafening. Hurried footsteps. Tony and Sweetie.

“How much did you hear?” Tony began to shout.

“Is Sam dead?” she asked him. “Please, tell me he’s not dead.” Hot panic flooded her, made it hard to see or think.

“How much did she hear?” Sweetie said, grabbing her around the waist and half lifting, half dragging her into the kitchen.

Fear kicked at her heart. “I didn’t hear anything,” she protested. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh for God’s sake, she
knows
now, Tony.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Tony had his head in his hands. “What an enormous
inconvenience
.”

Sweetie hitched Violet up, over his shoulder. She pounded on his back, frightened of falling forward on her head, but even more terrified of what he might do to her. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “You go be with Flora.”

“Don’t do anything—”

“Just go. I’ll take care of it.”

Then Violet was bouncing around over Sweetie’s shoulder, out the kitchen door and into the cold.

“Do you know how to shut up?” he said to her over his shoulder.

“I swear I won’t say anything.”

“I doubt that’s true. You were in love with him, weren’t you?”

“Is he really dead?”

“As a doornail, dollface.” Thump, thump, thump, over the snowy ground, while rain misted around them. The light of the hurricane lamp in the kitchen retreated into the distance. She heard a creak of metal on metal, and tried to turn her head to see where they were. He had one burly arm locked over the backs of her knees.

The flying fox. He had the door of the flying fox open and was trying to wrestle her into the tiny space.

“No!” she screamed.

“Shut up!” he shouted back, smacking her across the jaw and gathering her in his arms. He shoved her. Her limbs scraped over the metal edges around the door. She pushed back, but he pushed harder, his meaty arms no match for hers.

“Please!” she cried. “Please don’t do this.”

“Stay here till we figure out what to do with you.”

He thumped the door shut and she heard the rusty latch slam into place. Desperately, she hammered against the door, screaming until her throat was raw. It was a few minutes before she realized he was gone, back to the kitchen—to the end of the pulley.

Slowly, creaking on the frozen cables, the box began to move out over the valley.

“No!” she screamed. “Please, no!”

Then it stopped, swinging slightly in the cold night air.

*  *  *

The door to Sam’s room opened a crack, and Flora looked around to see Tony standing there, his face grim in the lamplight.

“I thought I might find you here,” he said.

“Go away.”

“Florrie . . .”

“You shouldn’t have taken him out there.”

“It was for the best. Before anyone else saw him dead.” He walked over to her, stroked her back gently through her dressing gown. “Come on. Come to your bedroom. It’s horrible in here.”

She sat up and looked around. He was right. Clothes strewn about, sour odors, a chair upended, objects overturned: the evidence of his last, horrific few days.

Then her eyes lit upon a green wallet, unfolded, near the bed. Flora bent down to peer at it. A medicine bottle. A syringe. “Tony, he took something.”

“He did?”

She held the syringe up to the light. “There’s blood on it. He took something. That’s what killed him.”

“What did he take? How did he get it?”

“I don’t know.” Had Sam killed himself? Had the pain and distress been too much for him?

Tony took the syringe from her, wrapped it with the bottle and other implements in the green pouch. “We’ll have to get rid of this, too.”

She snapped. “Have you no pity? Is the cover-up all you’re interested in?”

She watched Tony fight down his first response, which she imagined was an impatient one. Instead, he lifted her gently to her feet and said, “You need to get out of here now. He’s gone, and lying here in his filthy bed won’t bring him back.”

Flora let him lead her out into the cold hallway, then up the stairs to the ladies’ floor. As they passed Violet’s door, Flora thought about knocking, to tell Violet the terrible news. At least that way Flora could cry with somebody who loved Sam as much as she did. But Tony seemed to sense her hesitation, and propelled her past the door with firm hands.

“To your room, Florrie,” he said. “You need to rest. You’ve had a horrible shock.”

Then she was sitting on her own soft bed, surrounded by her own things. The last time she’d looked at these things—her letter-writing compendium, her inkwell, her shoes, her brolly—Sam had been alive; her life hadn’t yet been tipped on its axis.

Tony fished in his pocket for his hip flask and gave it to Flora. “Here. Take a few belts of whiskey.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Just do as you’re told,” he snapped. “You’re no help to anyone, including Sam and his legacy, in this state.”

“What do you mean?”

“Drink. Now.”

She lifted the flask to her lips and poured some of the scalding liquid into her mouth. Swallowed. Took another sip. Tony indicated with his hand she should keep going. Another gulp. Another. Then her stomach began to burn, and she handed it back to him.

Tony pulled her chair up beside her bed and sat on it, knees apart, hands reaching out to hers. He squeezed her fingers too hard.

“I’m sorry, Florrie. I wish there was something I could do to make it better.”

“There is. We need to go out there, as soon as we can, and retrieve his poor body and give him a proper burial.”

Tony was already shaking his head before the end of her sentence. “No, we can’t.”

“He shouldn’t be out there in the cold and the rain! He should be properly buried, properly remembered. He’s my baby brother. We need his body, and we need to find a doctor who will tell us how he died and—”

“Listen carefully,” Tony interrupted. “We can never tell anyone what really happened to Sam.”

“But we don’t know what happened. That’s just it.”

“He either died from illegal drugs or his own hand. That’s what happened. Either way, if your father finds out, nothing but bad things will come next.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Do you not see? All that is irrelevant now. I don’t care what Father does to me.”

“You should.”

“Why? We’ll have enough money, won’t we? Please tell me this isn’t about the money.”

Tony shook his head. “No.”

“Then, what is it?”

He sat silently for what seemed like an age, considering her in the lamplight. Overhead, the rain grew harder. Finally, he said, “It’s not my intention to marry into family scandal.”

“What?” Confusion made it impossible to follow, but she suspected he was saying something momentous and awful.

“My father will be just as shocked and angry as yours.”

“These things are so meaningless as to be laughable.
My brother is dead.
”

“One of the reasons the marriage is so advantageous on our side is the Honeychurch-Black name. My father is one generation out of the working class. You have no idea how much it means to him to be married to that name.”

A stone dropped on her heart. “And you? Do you care that much, too?”

He shrugged. “It’s not unimportant. Florrie, don’t look so shocked. I’m just being practical. You and I, we’re both practical, aren’t we?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Flora’s head seemed filled with the sound of mad birds’ wings beating.

“It’s just easier this way. We don’t have to explain anything to anybody. No criminal activity has to be reported, and Sam dies leaving behind only memories of him being a young, slightly fey but ultimately upstanding man. Your father is happy, my father is happy, life goes on.” He paused for effect, then said, “Sam would have wanted it this way.”

She snorted derisively. “Sam would have been appalled. He abhorred such snobbery.”

“No, he didn’t. He was as bad as the rest of us. Rude to the servants, chasing after waitresses. Lord, he’s been dead less than an hour and you’re already canonizing him.”

The effects of whiskey and grief confused her. Was he right? She
lived in such a rarefied world of money and privilege, all earned at the cost of individuality and personal freedom. There was no doubt that a death as sordid as Sam’s would damage the family’s reputation. But how cruel of Tony to bring it up now, to tell her how important a role her name played in his decision to marry her.

“What do you say, Florrie?”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said. “Leave me be. I need to cry and to sleep and to . . . think everything through. Life without Sam.” She shook her head. “I can’t even imagine it.”

“Imagine it sensibly,” he said. “You’re a sensible girl.” He leaned forwards and kissed her cheek. “You know where I am if you need me.”

The door closed behind him, and she had a strong urge to shout after him never to come back.

*  *  *

The rain came down.

Violet sat, her knees uncomfortably jammed up under her chin, her back hunched over. Shivering and shivering. The shivers started at her skin, under her uniform and her stockings and her singlet and bloomers, and then spread deeper and deeper inside her. Her blood shivered. Her muscles shivered. Her marrow shivered. Her guts shivered. The rain seeped in through a top corner of the box and trickled out through a bottom corner, after it had run behind her back, leaving a damp patch on her skirt. The box smelled of iron and dirt and blood—a reminder that it had been used many times to transport quartered pig carcasses and sacks of potatoes.

She had screamed for an hour, but her little voice out here over the valley was no match for the rain. With the rain, though, came warmer air. Now and again, a huge gust would spring up, carrying the cold off the snow and howling around her metal prison, but
mostly she was able to keep herself from freezing by staying curled in a ball, her head tucked down.

After an hour she stopped screaming and started to pray. She prayed that Clive would wake up in the morning and stubbornly come down to fix the flying fox. That he wouldn’t listen to her admonitions to stay in bed. That his sense of duty would win out and he would come and find her and take her to the police, where she could report what had happened to Sam and what Sweetie and Tony had done. She had to get somewhere safe; she had a baby inside her, Sam’s baby. If she survived this, and she was determined to survive this, she vowed she would do whatever was in her power to give this child the safest, happiest life possible.

These thoughts turned over and over in her mind as the night wore on. She sometimes dozed on her knees and sometimes she woke and remembered where she was and what had happened and then cried all over again. All the while the shivers continued. Not from cold, nor from fear, but from grief. The remorseless shivers of somebody who has lost the very thing they love most in the world, irrevocably and forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

F
lora woke with pain stinging every muscle of her body. She looked around groggily. She was lying on top of her bed, still in her robe. The events of the night before came back to her, and she realized what had caused the pain. Sorrow. Her whole body was grieving.

She sat up and checked the clock beside the bed. It was six in the morning, still gray outside the window, with rain falling steadily. She stood and peered out. The snow was melting to dirty gray mush. Today, if they wanted to, they could get out. Go to the village. Perhaps the trains would be running.

What was the point of getting out now, though? Getting out to go where? Home without Sam? Her wedding without Sam? The rest of her life without Sam?

Heavy feet dragged her to the bathroom, heavy limbs pulled on her clothes for the day, then with a heavy heart she set out to do what she knew she must.

Flora knocked softly on Violet’s door, tensed against discovery by Tony. There was no answer. She knocked again, a little louder, a little bolder, and said, “Violet? I need to speak with you.”

But of course, Violet would be downstairs helping prepare breakfast. The poor girl had barely had a moment off since the snow had
come down. Flora went down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to listen. Everything was quiet. So quiet. She headed along the hall and towards the kitchen. Empty. The stove had gone cold.

The first delicate tendril of worry touched her heart. Where was Violet? She supposed Violet might be anywhere in the building, as big and rambling as it was. But she would have to come to make breakfast. So, Flora pulled out a chair and sat down to wait in the cold kitchen. Her stomach growled. How she longed for the days of the bustling dining room, the heaped plates of hot food, the bottomless pots of hot tea.