Chapter 2
Odette
THE LONDON HOUSE IS a sinking ship.
Odette crosses the threshold and feels the floorboards lurch beneath her feet. This is wrong. This is not home anymore.
She lingered as long as she could, stretching out the minutes between the Heath and the house until night fell and she had no choice but to return. To face whatever is waiting for her.
The hallway is the same, of course, and the front door, and the same maid takes her coat and hat, and there is the same smell of lemon and vinegar from where someone has been scrubbing the tiles – but it is all overlaid with another set of images, like two photographs exposed on the same plate.
Here is where her mother’s coffin rested; here is where the funeral party formed.
To her left is the door to the drawing room, closed tight, and Odette watches it for a moment – straining, she realises, for the tapping.
There is nothing.
Of course, there is nothing. It is just a house, and she is mad.
She has spent two months in Cambridge hiding from a ghost, twitching at shadows and sleeping in bursts.
She has not seen the apparition again since the night of the funeral, and at times, she has convinced herself she has lost her mind.
Nothing is following her. Her mother is dead and cold beneath the soil.
But here, in the house in which Lydia lived, touched the banisters, left hairs on the armchair, spilt wine on the rug – the house in which she died, in which they washed her cooling body and lifted her coffin.
Ghost or no, her mother is still here.
Her father comes down the stairs, a look of pleasant surprise on his face, as though this is normal – a daughter walking in as though she has only been into town, not gone for two months without a word since the death of her mother.
She notes the wedding ring on his left hand, and she wonders whether he took one off and procured another, or simply sent the old one for cleaning and then used it again at the church in Germany.
‘Odette, we have missed you.’
Have they? Really? She misses the father who would not cast her mother off so easily, but perhaps this is who he always was, and what she misses is a construction of her own imagination.
She allows her cheek to be kissed. A few months away, and she sees it now for the affectation that it is. They are not bohemian and continental; they are awkward and English, and her mother was the only one of them with any true talent.
‘You have time to change before dinner,’ he adds, when Odette does not speak. ‘Your things arrived from the station and have been taken to your room.’
Yes. The dinner. The celebration of her father and her aunt’s wedding.
‘Must I attend?’
Her father’s smile becomes fixed. ‘Claudine has made a great effort for tonight’s meal, so I am sure you will do everything you can to make her feel at home.’
At home – the words send a bristle of anger through her. She wants to throw herself on the ground and beat her fists, reduced to a child in a way she finds hateful, embarrassing.
‘She has made herself at home quite thoroughly, I should say,’ she says instead.
For a moment, it looks as though her father will caution her, and she feels a thrill at it – that she might elicit a spark of honest emotion from him.
She thinks of all the time she has sat with him in his study, or listened to him speak on his reading, his work, listened to him explain the world for her, set it out in rules and wisdom.
Nailing it down so thoroughly until all the meat of life is twitching and limp, unable to fight back.
He has always wanted her to help him in this effort, to agree with him that, yes, this is how things are, yes, his understanding of the world is right – because her mother’s must be wrong, so fragile is it – therefore, his choices are the correct ones, his wants are reasonable.
What was once so certain is cast into absurdity. How can she go on as she had with him? How could she support him in this?
But he does nothing. As always, he sinks back into a vague smile, and continues as though he has not heard her.
He pats her shoulder. ‘You’re looking well.’ With that he goes to his study.
Odette breathes hard through her nose. It is unthinkable to go upstairs, to change for dinner.
Smile at their guests. Eat, drink. Make conversation.
It is mad – this whole world is mad. What does it matter, then, if she sees a ghost?
She is too alive with feeling; her hands are clammy, her breath short.
How can she endure this? How can she be here?
It is all she can do to make herself turn mechanically into the drawing room, where Penelope, Leo and Cecilia have already gathered to wait for the dinner gong.
Drinks have been poured, and above the mantelpiece the large painting of Cecilia cowering and scared as Mary at the annunciation has been removed.
The London house is airy and modern where Herne House is ancient and brooding, and the effect is strengthened by the gaslights being turned up brighter than her mother would ever have set them.
But they cannot dispel the winter dark, and the shadows seem to fall more heavily in spite of them.
Claudine stands a little apart in a purple velvet evening dress with beaded appliqué and regards Odette coldly.
‘Are you not joining us for dinner?’
It is like the abrupt slap of a cold ocean wave to see her again. Odette cannot look at her – cannot look away.
Her aunt. Stepmother.
Her mother’s murderer?
‘I am,’ says Odette.
‘You are not dressed.’
Odette looks down at herself. ‘I do not believe I am naked.’
Leo chokes back a laugh and earns a discreet smack on the arm from Penelope. Cecilia does not meet her eye.
Claudine draws her lips into a bloodless line, though she does not speak.
Oh. She should not have said that. What does she mean by it? Why does she draw Claudine’s ire?
Revenge. Murder.
She can hear the ghost’s words now as plainly as the night they were spoken.
Odette takes a glass of sherry and holds it tightly for support.
Can she really believe Claudine had a hand in her own sister’s death?
She thinks again of her mother folding in on herself, the blood pouring from her mouth.
The sickness that started only after Claudine’s arrival.
Claudine, who now sits prettily as a new wife, mistress of the London residence and Herne House, instructing her dead sister’s servants and sleeping between her dead sister’s sheets.
For a moment, Odette’s eye is caught by the shape of a figure in the shadows behind Cecilia, in the lee of the chimney breast, and she thinks another of their party must have arrived – but when she looks again, it is gone.
Finally, George arrives amidst the safety of the dinner guests; Eddie Rutherford leads the way with Mr Wrexham, in hot debate over the merits of Hardy’s Wessex Poems and Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which have both been published this year.
Mousy Mrs Wrexham follows, and a few of the usual crowd, though Odette notes that the more beautiful, artistic women have been replaced by stolid society wives whom Odette has heard her father call terrible bores.
‘Are we all here?’ says Eddie. ‘I saw Mullen heading towards the gong.’
‘Could Mr King not join us?’ asks Cecilia.
‘Unfortunately not,’ says George. ‘Do I sense a special interest in Mr King?’
Cecilia goes pink and stares at her feet. ‘Not at all.’
‘A most unsuitable match,’ declares Penelope. ‘I’ll thank you not to encourage it.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ says Cecilia again, but only Odette seems to hear her.
The gong sounds. Odette is flushed into the dining room by Penelope and Leo behind her, and she sits down at the table where they laid out her mother’s body.
There is an anger in her that feels like a sickness. Her skin fits wrongly; each breath is a task around this great boulder of sorrow and rage and injustice that has swelled and swelled, a great boil that is close to setting her howling.
She does not know how to say what is wrong. It is so obvious what is wrong that it makes her feel mad to have to say it.
But then, what is never said is how wrong it has been for so long.
She remembers, suddenly, her mother drawing her down beneath the blankets on the couch in her studio in Herne House, the smell of wine on her breath.
God. No. Stop it.
Silence is her best option, and she exercises it liberally, looking only at the pattern on the series of plates placed before her, mock-turtle soup, stewed eels, grouse, lobster, sweetbreads, lifting her glass in toast when required, and letting the conversation wash blankly over her.
A woman passes the doorway, white skirts flashing in the corner of Odette’s eye, and she looks around to see which of the guests has risen from their place – but they are all present.
The skin prickles along the back of her neck.
This is her mother’s house.
Her mother would not leave it so easily.
No. A maid, the flash of her starched apron.
Only—
Odette drinks deeply from her wine glass and listens to Claudine, who is holding court.
‘I must apologise for the potatoes – quite plebeian in their simplicity, but it takes time to train up a new cook.’
Odette has the distinct impression that Claudine thinks she has said something wry and witty, rather than simply rude.
There is appreciative laughter and much discussion of the plebeian potatoes, and Odette realises how absolutely dull her father’s set is.
Leo laughs along, a little too obviously keen to be counted amongst them; he has grown a small moustache in the months Odette has been away and she sees now that it is a poor copy of Mr Wrexham’s.
No wonder Lydia became a little strange when she had been trapped amongst these tiresome people for twenty years.
As if in response, there is a cold gust against her neck. The candles do not flicker.
Odette holds the stem of her glass tighter.
Here is the thought that has stolen her sleep, her appetite, stalked her through the fens of Cambridge:
What if the apparition was real?
She hides her face in her cup for a moment, suddenly hot, her heart racing, as though the people sat around her can hear her thoughts.
What if she is not mad at all?
Dinner progresses through the courses until dessert is placed on the table, with fresh fruit, bon-bons, dried and candied fruit intermingled with lemon-water ices and sweet wine.
Claudine sits amongst it, candlelight flashing off the jewels at her throat and the crystal of the glass in her hand, smiling, triumphant.
What if Odette has sat down to dinner with a killer?
*
There are worms in her mother’s eyes and weaving through the slack flesh of her cheeks. The rasp of breath over the desiccated lips, fetid and damp air against Odette’s cheek. Living-dead. Dead-living.
Her mother in her bed. Her mother dead. Her mother murdered.
From one breath to the next, Odette wakes.
For a moment, the dream exists alongside consciousness – a doubling, inner and outer world muddled.
She lies still, tensed like an animal scenting the hunter, listening to the subtle shifting of the room, the hush of the wind against the window frame, the soft hiss of the banked fire, the wood settling, groaning.
There is someone outside her door.
She is sure of it.
The door is flat and large and closed flush. She cannot see anything, cannot hear anyone, but she knows it in the same way that she knows the moment before rain begins to fall or—
Someone is waiting for her.
She did not know before what it meant to be frozen with fear. She thought it a turn of phrase, but now she understands that it is all too literal. Her body is rigid and beyond her control.
Seconds draw out like hours. The rush of her blood in her ears. The frantic thump of her heart.
The church bell strikes three beyond the window, and the moment breaks. The dream subsides, and the hush of the night-world grows human: the rattle of distant carriages, the maid turning over in her bed, the squeak of springs, a mouse in the walls.
Odette curls into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. She cannot take her eyes from the door.
It is unbearable to be here in this house. To not know if what she saw was real. If what her mother’s ghost told her is true. She must know or surely lose her wits.
More than anything, she wishes she were not alone in this.
It is her own fault for pushing Cecilia away, but it seems impossible to do anything else. How can she tell her the truth? She could not survive it if Cecilia’s expression changed in distrust, disbelief.
She has no proof of anything.
How can a ghost be proved real?
Wait.
Odette moves at last, slithering from her bedclothes and crouching beside her travelling bag, compact and hunched as though she can conceal herself from watchful eyes. She pulls out an illustrated magazine she read on the train and turns to the pages she skipped over in fear before.
Communing with the Ethers.
Mediums. Séances. Automatic writing.
Perhaps there is something she can do to find out.