The Honours (34 page)

CHAPTER 37

SHE WHO FIGHTS MONSTERS

‘
P
ut her down, Patience.'

It was Mother who spoke. She stood five yards or so from Miss DeGroot.

‘I said give me a moment!' Miss DeGroot bunched a clump of hair in her fist and took some deep breaths.

Delphine struggled but she was held fast. She glanced down at the tendril wrapped round her wrist. It was fat and translucent, sweating like melted cheese.

‘Is this what you want to be?' Mother stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Really? A bully?'

‘What I
want
, Anne, is justice.'

‘Then let my daughter go. She's not your enemy.'

Delphine felt the grip on her throat slacken.

‘I couldn't help it,' said Miss DeGroot. ‘I didn't mean to. Ivan . . . he forced me into this. Look at me. Look what he's done.'

Mother licked her dry lips and took a breath. Delphine could see the fatigue flickering at the edges of her eyes.

‘You're right to be angry. It's wrong to exploit the innocent to satisfy one's own needs. So now you must make a choice. Are you someone like that . . . ' Mother took a step forward. ‘Or are you someone who helps?'

Delphine shunted with her elbows, trying to ease the pressure on
her lungs. Miss DeGroot's grip loosened a little further. Delphine inhaled, her nostrils filling with the peaty, beery smell.

‘I can't go back now,' she said. ‘You heard Ivan. It can't be undone. I've chosen.'

Mother's gaze shifted to Delphine. Her expression softened.

‘Nonsense, Patience. We are always choosing.' She glanced at the body slumped in the fireplace. ‘I don't suppose
he
can ask any more of you. You're free. Now. Who do you want to be?'

Miss DeGroot's eyelid trembled. She looked to Delphine, then down at the waxy cables hanging from her shoulder.

‘I want to be human,' she said quietly.

‘Then choose accordingly.'

Miss DeGroot stared at the floor for a long time.

Delphine felt the tendrils binding her sag. They fell away, sliding back into the black puddles. Delphine staggered, found her feet.

She glanced up. Miss DeGroot spat a purple-blue mist. Something small and hard was sticking out of her windpipe. Reggie spluttered.

Miss DeGroot twisted to the left. An arrow was protruding from her neck.

Delphine turned. Daddy stood in the doorway, soaked in blood.

‘Giddy?'

‘Daddy!'

Miss DeGroot made a strangling noise.

Delphine began running towards her father. Daddy was alive. Her whole body tingled with relief and joy and the need to get him and Mother to safety. Soot smutted his face and his hair swung in tangles. He nocked a second arrow, raised it at Miss DeGroot. His jaw worked as he closed one eye.

Delphine's elation turned to panic.

‘Don't shoot! We were talking to her!'

Daddy calmly relaxed his fingers. The arrow flew:
kwip
. Reggie arched his back and yelled, but when Delphine turned she saw Miss DeGroot had parried the shot, the shaft embedded in the pulsing meat of her transformed arm. The flesh had reknitted into a thick club head. Purple juice ran from the wound.

‘Stop it!' The cry came from Alice. ‘You're hurting Reggie. Every time you hurt her, it hurts Reggie.'

Daddy did not seem to hear. Delphine had almost reached him when someone spoke.

‘Stay where you are.'

The voice did not belong to Miss DeGroot.

Delphine turned and saw Mr Cox brushing dust off his silk waistcoat. Behind him, midriff lacerated with greasy scar tissue, stood Stokeham. A gauntleted hand went up, adjusted the mask. The beak had a hole in it the size of a ha'penny, cracks spidering out. Through it, Delphine could make out white flesh, the dark slash of a mouth.

‘Don't trust them, Patience,' said Cox. ‘They will flatter and deceive but, in the end, they are rats. I see they have kept you sufficiently distracted to let Ivan make good his escape.'

Delphine glanced around with a start. Mr Propp was gone.

Cox unhooked the flintlock pistol from his belt. ‘We must defend ourselves.' He hesitated. He blinked at the doorway. ‘Who on earth is that?'

‘Even inner God,' said Daddy. Something smoked in his fist. A milk bottle. He swept his arm back.

Alice ran at him. ‘No!'

He threw.

The bottle arced to the right and smashed against the quatrefoil-patterned wallpaper. Ginger-white flames flowed down the wall and across the floor, along spreading channels of turpentine. Delphine had to shield her eyes. As they adjusted she saw the silhouette of Miss DeGroot shielding her face with her huge, engorged limb. She did not seem to be fully in control of it; she staggered under its weight, flailing. The arm swung out, crashing through a rosewood teapoy with Stokeham's little lacquered pine cabinet on top. The cabinet fell open and the stoppered jar inside burst against the floor, spraying chips of glass.

Something black and irredescent zigzagged from the wreckage.

Delphine staggered to her feet. She heard screams. A guest lunged at Miss DeGroot and she pancaked him into the wall with a horrible crunch of bone.

Daddy did not spot Alice until it was too late. She had picked up a knife. Delphine saw the dull flash as Alice lunged.

‘You're hurting him!'

‘Daddy, look out!'

Daddy tried to spin aside and the blade glanced his thigh. Delphine screamed, reaching uselessly.

Daddy staggered back into the hallway. Alice stood, shivering. The knife slipped from her palm.

‘Run!' said the Professor. ‘Now. Everyone.'

Delphine sprinted for the open doors. The Professor was ahead of her. He threw a huge arm round the stunned Alice and dragged her along with him.

Delphine heard a pistol report and a chunk of door frame splintered. When she glanced back Miss DeGroot was backlit by flames, a nest of black snakes. Tentacles slipped under Reggie and plucked him from his chair.

Delphine ran into the hallway, heading south. Daddy was nowhere to be seen. The corridor was dark after the glare of the fire. Greats from Ancient Greece lay beheaded and cloven.

Her shoes crunched on broken glass. Mother was with her. Mrs Hagstrom and the one surviving guest hobbled behind.

She followed the Professor as he lumbered down the corridor.

‘Wait!' she said.

He glanced back, panting. He seemed to get bigger every time she looked at him.

Delphine felt a hand pushing her, driving her onwards.

‘Keep going,' said Mother, lips almost touching her ear.

‘What about Reggie?'

‘We can't,' said Mother. She inhaled sharply, clenched her teeth as she ran. ‘We can't.'

The Great Hall's domed ceiling had disappeared behind roiling grey smoke. A glow came from the corridors beyond the landing. The crump and crickle of combustion.

There were corpses everywhere. Mrs Hagstrom staggered towards
the entrance, grimacing with each step, clutching her sodden blouse in her fist, yanking at it.

‘I'm not leaving without Daddy,' said Delphine.

Professor Carmichael let Alice slump against the door frame. ‘Miss Venner,
please
. You can't risk your life on – '

‘There!' Delphine pointed at the top of the staircase. ‘The bow he was carrying.'

‘I'm going with you,' said Mother.

Delphine did not have the strength to argue. She nodded.

‘Algernon – get them all to safety,' said Mother.

The Professor dipped his huge head. ‘Yes, Mrs Venner.'

Delphine was turning towards the stairs when she saw Mr Wightman asleep against the bannister, grey flesh pooling around his chin.

She stepped towards him. ‘Hello?'

He did not reply. She moved closer.

He had his bottom lip pushed out, as if sulking.

‘Delphine . . . '

‘Shh.' Delphine held her hand up to silence Mother. ‘Mr Wightman? Can you hear me?'

An oval shadow spread from his chins across his paunch. But the light was coming from the windows . . .

She saw.

His throat was slit. The shadow was a bib of black blood that had hardened and corrugated on his shirt. His cheeks were the colour of suet.

Mother was on the stair. She put a hand to her mouth: ‘Ah.'

Mr Wightman's dented head sagged to one side. Delphine stepped back and the Hall spun and she heard her yells echoing off the walls, then she was trapped, arms pinned to her side, and Mother was gripping her from behind, whispering into her ear: ‘Suck it down. Suck it deep, deep inside you. That's it. You'll have time for upset later, but for now, you must find a strongroom down in your belly and lock it all away.'

Delphine took a long breath and held it.

‘Good,' said Mother. She let go and began vigorously rubbing
Delphine's arm. ‘Stand tall. You're even stronger than you think.'

Delphine nodded, felt her jaw shake as she exhaled. She could not stop staring at Mr Wightman. On the step beside him was a severed horn, the tip tacky with blood.

CHAPTER 38

SAY, FATHER, SAY

February 5th 1935 / September 12th 1935

B
ack in February, someone set Delphine's school on fire. There were three suspects.

Agnes Trevanion was a fourth-former who smoked imported cigarettes on school grounds, sneaked out late to meet surly boys with borrowed motorcycles and factory jobs, and once punched Mr Fitzwilliam when he patted her thigh in the Classics room at lunchtime. People said she had only escaped expulsion because her father was very rich, or her father was something to do with the Cosa Nostra. She stood ramrod straight with black hair that fell piratically across her left eye. Delphine was hungrily in love with her.

Meredith Roylance was a doughy grey girl in the year above with a tubercular cough and weeping pink eyes. Sunlight picked out long scintillating whiskers on her upper lip and chin. She had no friends. She moved from room to room like a baleful fog. At night, noises came from her bed that might have been eating or sobbing. A popular rumour held that she drank her own menstrual blood and called it ‘Communion'.

The third suspect was Delphine – a girl middling in all respects, whose watchful silences, once taken for shyness, would soon be diagnosed as the brooding, icy rage of the moral defective, whose inoffensive demeanour was reimagined as reptilian cunning, whose few minor transgressions against the patience of her teachers were
recast as the first crackling pebbles that presaged a great landslide of infamy. In their minds, she had always planned to visit destruction upon St Eustace's, ever since she had stood in the hall on her first day, straw hat clutched to her chest, palm raised towards the headmaster as she recited the school pledge.

After all, it was in her blood.

On the night of the fire at St Eustace's, minutes after she had left Eleanor Wethercroft tied up in the boiler room, Delphine sneaked back across the shadow-drenched quadrangle to free her. She would march down the stairs smiling, saying it was all a joke, ha ha. What a fun game we played together, ha ha. Eleanor Wethercroft would go along with the pretence to save face. Revenge would come later.

Delphine was halfway through the solid black of the Sacred Arch when she realised there was someone in there with her. She held her breath and waited for the axe to fall.

‘Delphine Venner.'

The millstone grate was unmistakable. Mrs Leddington: pinheaded bruiser, silhouette like the ace of spades. She stepped from the murk. Her thin eyes were initials carved in a desk.

‘Delphine Venner, 2H.' She said 2H like coordinates, like she was about to sink Delphine's battleship. ‘What are you doing out of your bed so late?'

Delphine pressed her shoulder blades to the wall, running her palms over cold stone. Any answer she gave would be wrong.

‘I forgot something, miss.'

‘It is forbidden for girls to walk the school grounds after lights out.' Mrs Leddington invested the words of the School Code with atavistic gravity, breathing wetly, moistening her lips with her tongue. All the rules began that way: ‘It is forbidden' or ‘All girls are expected', never admitting by whom or why.

Mrs Leddington leant in close to Delphine. Her voice dropped to a murmur.

‘Are you all right?'

Delphine recognised the trap. Mrs Leddington wanted her to lower her guard, incriminate herself. She focused on the boil that split Mrs Leddington's left eyebrow into two ovals of coarse black hair.

‘I'm sorry, miss. I'll go back to bed straight away, miss.'

She turned to leave. Mrs Leddington's palm shot out and slapped the wall, blocking Delphine's path. Skin bulged either side of a thick gold ring.

‘The last few weeks must have been very hard for you,' said Mrs Leddington. Something on the side of Delphine's head caught her attention. She leaned forward, squinting. ‘Delphine . . . ' Her breath smelt of medicine. She drew back. ‘How long has your hair been grey?'

Delphine felt her face getting hot.

‘Since I was little, miss.'

Mrs Leddington closed her eyes and nodded. When she opened them they glistened with a terrible, burrowing charity.

‘I had a word with your friends. Prue and Eleanor and Jacqueline. To explain what happened.' She coughed. ‘Regarding your father.'

‘Miss, that's none of their business.'

‘In times of hardship, a young woman needs the compassion of her peers. They were very understanding and agreed to support you.'

‘I don't want their support.'

‘I know it's hard to – '

‘You shouldn't have told them.'

‘Miss Venner, please do not raise your voice. May I remind you – '

‘It's none of their business.'

‘Miss Venner!' The gold ring clacked as the palm struck stonework. ‘Regardless of your circumstances I will not countenance disrespect. You will report to me tomorrow morning before breakfast. Return quickly and quietly to your dormitory.'

Delphine pressed her lips together. She inhaled through her nostrils till her lungs were tight, held it.

‘Yes, miss.'

Often, in the months that followed, she wondered what would have happened if she had never encountered Mrs Leddington beneath the Sacred Arch, if she had not been forced on that long trudge back across the gloomy quadrangle. Perhaps she would have freed Eleanor Wethercroft without drama. Perhaps no one would have thought to blame plain, average Delphine Venner, troubled father notwithstanding.
And if they had not blamed her, she would not have been expelled. If she had not been expelled, she would not have come to Alderberen Hall with her family. And if she had not come Alderberen Hall, who could say? Perhaps the air above the woods would never have blackened with needle-gobbed skinwings. Perhaps Dr Lansley would have sat in the drawing room, fiddling with his deaf-aid battery and scowling, heedless of the lack of a hole in his skull. Perhaps Mrs Hagstrom would have trimmed the lid of a mutton pie before dropping the soft rind into her mouth, while Alice did wicked, continental things to Reg Gillow in the broken shifting moonlight of the orchard. Perhaps the bleak inferno of Daddy's madness would have guttered and died.

Perhaps Delphine was the critical geartooth in a dire and intricate machine.

As she lay in her bed on the night of the fire – before anyone
knew
it was the night of the fire – she began a ritual that sustained her for months, becoming so automatic she forgot anything had come before.

She closed her eyes, and from the darkness behind her eyelids swam the stricken catfish leer of Mrs Leddington.

She gazed upon the face and her gut tightened. Then: the hate.

Delphine lay unable to sleep. The dorm was freezing. The window was left open even in February, on account of Judith Shenk's asthma.

She had pulled the blanket up to her nose. Each time she inhaled, her nostrils stung with cold. Most nights, the ceiling's tea-coloured water stains looked like a treasure map. Tonight, they were burning houses.

Morag Gethin-Spence was snoring – a steady, rolling purr. Outside, bats chirruped as they swooped between the eaves. Delphine smelt motor oil, toast.

She sat up sharply. She sniffed.

The scent was distinct and familiar. The room seemed to roll astern. She grabbed the mattress to steady herself. She felt sick. It couldn't be.

Delphine dropped from her bed and tiptoed to the window. Even through thick woollen socks, the floor felt icy. She slipped behind the long curtains.

A wheezy voice murmured: ‘Hey . . . don't close . . . the window . . . '

Delphine leant over the sill, gazing out across the quad, the bell tower, the sloped black roof of Koblenz wing, the changing huts, and the playing fields beyond. Above the boiler room, the windows of the Domestic Science rooms pulsed with a faint amber light.

Her cheeks smarted in the cold. The smell was crisp and clear and undeniable.

Fire.

The sour tang thickened in her nostrils as she ran down the corridor. The air grew gauzy; lavish portraits of school patrons past and present faded behind grey mist. She was out of breath. Her eyes stung.

Eleanor Wethercroft might be burning alive. Smoke might be churning about her ankles as she screamed for help, her throat ragged, her hair hanging in lank, oily ropes.

In the darkness, the school felt papery and slight. She felt like a ghost haunting her old life. She glanced out of a window and saw only her reflection: a bright staring girl, floating in black.

The rules were superstition. She had foresworn their protective magics long ago. She was going to get expelled whatever she did.

Delphine hit the alarm and pushed –

– on through Alderberen Hall's smoke-filled corridors, dark clouds thickening overhead.

‘Daddy!' A picture frame cracked under her heel.

‘Giddy!' said Mother.

Delphine grasped a door knob then pulled her hand away with a cry. The metal was searingly hot.

Mother kicked it.

‘Giddy? Are you there?' She kicked again and the door swung inward, a blast of heat and black –

– opaque smoke on the other side of the frosted glass, surging like ink in water. Her route to the boiler room was blocked. Delphine
felt a breeze on the nape of her neck as the fire drank air; a wall display of sixth-form still-life sketches began applauding. The doors to Domestic Science juddered in their frames. Paint bubbled and oozed. The fire alarm was a distant ache.

She would have to go round the long way, see if she could break in through the back doors.

She ran back down the corridor, her head a blizzard of slander: the lunatic's daughter, the murderess. She had done this deliberately, they would say –
revenge
, Prue Dunbar and Jacqueline Finks-Hanley would attest, shaking their heads solemnly,
we were only teasing, miss, it was just a joke, but she threw a
fit
. . . and the eyes, miss
– and here Prue Dunbar would gasp into her hankie –
I was so afraid of her . . . of what she might do
.

She passed the school trophy cabinet, caught a flash of movement – no, it was just her reflection in the glass. She was almost at the door. After that it was a long jog round the outside of the block. She flicked hair out of her face then an arm clamped around her throat –

– and she whirled round, slamming her back into the wall; the vesperi released its grip and fell. Mother moved in, dagger raised.

All around, antique furniture roasted, black skeletons on white flames. The vesperi folded its wings over its head, cowering.

Mother hesitated.

‘Kill it!' Delphine screamed; the words were a reflex, a trigger-pull.

Mother waited. The beige wings were spidered with capillaries; wrapped over one another, they looked like the panels of a complicated kite. Delphine's skin tingled in the heat. Breathing was making her thirsty. Dust sheets peeled away, shedding black flakes edged with molten orange that floated up drunkenly. The windows were open. Outside, it was raining.

Mother stepped back, gesturing for Delphine to do the same.

‘Go,' she said.

The crumpled vesperi did not move.

‘Go now,' said Mother, louder. ‘I don't want to harm you.'

One of the wings rucked, exposing a single bluegrey eye. The eye peered at Mother.

She took another step back.

The vesperi shut its wings and stood. Delphine saw now it had blood crusted around its muzzle. One of its arms hung limp. Its pupils were pinpricks.

The vesperi stared into her eyes for a long instant.

It turned, running into the chaos of the burning room. A drop-leaf table collapsed in a shower of cinders; the vesperi jumped, its wings spreading, slapping the air. Smoke wafted in loose parentheses, fanned back; flames flared; the vesperi jumped again, beat its wings. It was going to hit the wall. It jumped a third time; its wings met in a steep V, pumped; it tucked its legs in and swished over the sill, out the open window, into the night.

A hand on Delphine's shoulder.

‘Come on.'

Mother shook her. Delphine could not stop staring at the window.

‘Delphine!' Mother yanked Delphine's –

– arm pinned to the floor under a knee as Eleanor Wethercroft clouted her in the nose. Delphine's eyes watered; she clutched at Eleanor's throat, felt her fingers close around the cold, sharp crucifix that hung from Eleanor's necklace.

‘I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll kill you.' Eleanor chanted the words with breathless momentum until they slurred into nonsense: ‘you I'll kill you I'll kill you'll kill you'll kill you'll killyul killyulk ill yulk illyuk'.

Delphine tugged and felt the delicate silver chain snap. Eleanor shrieked, clawing at Delphine's face – the cross was a keepsake from her dead grandmother.
^*
Nails broke the skin. Delphine swatted with her free hand – her pinned arm was going numb.
She tried to roll but Eleanor's knees had her trapped. Eleanor spat on her and punched her in the eye and clamped her hands round her neck. Eleanor was a good half a stone heavier. Delphine walloped her arm and she did not flinch. Rage had made her implacable.

Delphine had the crucifix bunched in her fist. She could not breathe. Eleanor had lost her reason. She was going to throttle Delphine. Delphine let one of the crucifix's wicked little trefoil heads slip out between her third and forth knuckles and prayed to Nana Florence for absolution. She lunged and raked it down Eleanor Wethercroft's exposed arm.

It snagged sickeningly. Blood welled in a deep trench. Eleanor's eyes bulged; she gripped her tricep and immediately her palm slipped in blood. She squeezed and fat red droplets like cherries oozed over the webbing of her fingers.

Delphine flung the cross across the corridor; it jangled off the wall, gleaming. Eleanor watched its trajectory and in the instant of distraction Delphine grabbed her earlobe and pulled, hard.

Eleanor Wethercroft –