Summer 1898, Herne House, Suffolk
IT IS THE TIME OF night when only the dead are abroad.
Three o’clock strikes on the plain Georgian long-case clock in the entrance hall, slender and solemn, and on the sleek French mantel clock above the cold grate in the drawing room, hemmed in by dried flowers and mezzotints of Burne-Jones and Rossetti.
By Odette’s bed, the pocket watch that hangs from a nail in the wall makes no sound as the minute and hour hands join together in brief union.
She stirs lightly, brow puckering as her head shifts upon the pillow.
The shadows are heavy in the depth of the small hours, cool and slow-moving as a glacier, spreading out to consume the hallways and corners, retreating at the glow of an oil lamp upon a bedside table, drawing back to expose a slipper knocked upside down in carelessness, a crumpled shift, a torn sheet of writing paper.
There is a noise in the house.
A soft tap-tap-tapping.
Odette does not wake; nor does Cecilia, curled beside her, nor her father in his room along the corridor. The boot boy lying by the kitchen door senses nothing, and the maids in their attic bedrooms sleep deeply.
In a slice of moonlight that cuts across the dining room, there is a flash of movement, then a tap-tap-tapping like bare feet scurrying across the floor.
There are stories about Herne House. It is that sort of place.
Along a creek that splits around the timber-framed building to form a moat lie three storeys of argument between wood and stone and ivy, water seeping up from the marshland, reeds spreading close enough to brush the mortar.
It is an old place. The moat once ringed a Norman manor.
The curving staircase was built from an Armada wreck.
There are bones beneath the flags of the hall – perhaps once a chapel; perhaps not.
The footsteps echo through the hall, through the dust and the spiderwebs.
In the corner of a mirror or in a pane of glass, there is the shape of movement.
Odette rolls over in her bed, pressing her face into Cecilia’s shoulder.
Cecilia is so still in her sleep that she is like an effigy carved on the tomb of some medieval lady in the church along the lane.
If she wants, Odette knows she can stretch out an arm and hook it around her waist, and Cecilia will not stir.
A cold breeze rises from somewhere unknown – though that is not so strange in this old and crooked place.
It is only that these August nights are not so warm, not here in Suffolk, where the wind blows fast and crisp from the North Sea over the flat salt marshes and fenland to the north and east. Nothing more.
The noise is on the landing.
Odette shifts again. It is colder.
Tap-tap-tap.
The noise is outside her door.
Odette, in her light sleep, frowns.
Wakes.
The flame in the oil lamp gutters as the door swings slowly open – just far enough for a pale hand to curl around the frame.
Cecilia is awake at once and slithers soundlessly from the bed. Odette cannot breathe. She watches the half-shape of Cecilia disappear.
There is a hiss of white skirts over floorboards and the tap-tap-tap as the footsteps glide towards the bed.
There is someone behind her.
The covers slip from Odette’s shoulders, exposing the line of her neck.
Cold fingers slide across her skin, one by one, pressing against the fluttering point of her pulse. There is a breath to match, so close it is as though she is being embraced.
A fragile weight presses against her back.
‘Mother,’ says Odette. ‘Go to bed.’
Lydia Fairfax-Waugh snakes her arm around her daughter’s waist and curls into her. ‘In a little while, angel.’
The back of Odette’s nightdress grows damp, and she understands that her mother is crying.
‘Please. I want to sleep.’
‘Then sleep, darling, I won’t stop you.’
The weight of her arm is like an iron beam pinning Odette in place. How can she turn her mother away when she cries so? How can she, and not be a monster?
‘It is too much to bear,’ says her mother after a moment. ‘They put all these papers before me and expect me to make decisions. It is impossible. It is cruel.’
Odette pieces together what her mother has fixated on now. ‘It cannot be so bad, for people make wills every day. Far stupider people than you manage it.’
It is the wrong thing to say. Her mother’s arm tightens around her, and she weeps. ‘I feel like a small child sent to work in some monstrous factory. No one has any care for me.’
Odette stares ahead blankly. It is quite dark, but the oil lamp sends a flickering shadow over her clothespress, illuminating the elaborate curls of the brass handle.
She has learnt a trick where, if she focuses totally on one small point in her vision to the exclusion of all others, it is as though she disappears entirely.
The world expands until it is all brass and the play of light on metal and the swoop and curl of an acanthus leaf.
Her own body does not exist. She is not a girl with a mother. She is nothing.
‘I would have no reason to live without you,’ says her mother. ‘Don’t argue, because I am telling you, it is true. I know you will never leave me. You’re such a good daughter.’
The screws in the handle need tightening.
The left sags lower than the right, like a drooping mouth.
It casts a long shadow down the walnut door panel, a wandering dark line, as though her mother has gone at the wood with her paints and dashed lamp black across the grain.
There is a stray lock of Cecilia’s hair on the carpet, spilling out from where she has hidden beneath the bed.
They are too practised at this. They are too used to vacating their own lives.
‘Will you?’ asks her mother. ‘Leave me?’
Their breathing evens out, matching speed and depth until they are one breath, one heartbeat.
It disgusts her.
‘No,’ says Odette. ‘I won’t leave you.’
There is no other answer to give.