Chapter 4
Odette
ODETTE WAITS FOR NIGHTFALL before she begins.
The household is not up late; they are not entertaining tonight, and soon Mrs Binx is securing the shutters and the doors.
Odette lies in Lydia’s studio, where the workmen have made a mess of everything: a foot put through a canvas, brushes snapped and paints shoved haphazardly to one side.
Here, she listens. There is the turn of the key and the scrape of the bolt.
The steady footsteps patrolling the hallways to snuff out each gas lamp. The murmured goodnights.
Then – silence.
The Hampstead house is nothing like Herne House.
It has no maze of forgotten passageways and priest holes, no easy way to step into the gaps between worlds – but that does not mean it is impossible.
Cecilia has shown her one or two places where the veil grows thin: the airing cupboard into which a whole person can fit and conceal themselves behind the laundry, the turn in the stairs where, stood just so, a body can disappear.
And downstairs, there was once a connecting door between Lydia’s room and the blue room, where George and Claudine now sleep.
In the blue room, the door was nailed shut and papered over, but in Lydia’s room, the deep alcove into which the door was set prevented this, and instead a wardrobe was pushed in front of it.
Cecilia once discovered that, with a little care, it was possible to wriggle behind the wardrobe and into the alcove.
Odette listens to the church bells chime through the night, until she marks a quarter to three. She slithers downstairs and into her mother’s bedroom, then worms her way into her hiding place.
It is too dark to see a thing, but she can feel the shape of the door, the hinges, the handle that has no counterpart. On the other side, her father and her aunt lie together. Behind her is her mother’s deathbed.
With a slow and firm hand, she gives three loud knocks.
Silence reigns.
Perhaps only the scuffle of a mouse in the walls.
Carefully, three more loud knocks.
Now, a shifting. She imagines Claudine rising up on her elbow, blinking around the dark room, half in a dream.
Three knocks in sharp succession.
Did she imagine it? Was that a gasp?
Odette lets the tension draw out, fine as a knifepoint. Just when she imagines that Claudine might be lying down again, she knocks low, near the floor, a steady drumbeat, slow enough that she can hear movement in the room.
Footsteps on the other side of the door. Claudine is up.
Hissed words, then a low voice. She has roused George.
Odette stops.
Murmured voices. A rising frustration in Claudine’s tone until she grows loud enough for the words to break through.
‘—am not mad.’
Hmm. Yes. Now.
Odette gives a single knock.
The silence that follows is exquisite. She can picture them both, George sat up in bed, Claudine stood beside him in her nightgown, staring at the wall that separates them from Lydia’s death room.
She gives three short raps.
‘Hello?’ says Claudine.
Three more raps.
George’s voice is still low, but now he moves. Mattress springs – heavier footsteps.
He comes close enough that she can hear him clearly.
‘It will be something come loose and knocking in the wind.’
Odette cannot resist giving another three knocks in response.
‘There, it is steady – don’t you see? There will be a simple solution.’
‘It’s coming from her room,’ says Claudine, her voice strangled.
‘Maybe so. It is not being tended to, so it would be easy to overlook an open window or broken shutter.’
The footsteps move away and into the corridor. Odette keeps up her knocking, a steady siren, until the door to Lydia’s room opens and she stops at once.
They are here with her now.
She waits, imagines them pacing the room, inspecting chairs and tables for uneven legs knocking against the floor or checking for unsecured curtains at the window.
Will they hear her breathing? No, surely not, she is quiet as death.
She changes approach. With the heel of her foot, she stamps on the floorboards, a low and resonant sound that travels through the space, seeming to come from everywhere at once.
Claudine shrieks. ‘That is no broken shutter.’
George does not reply. He cannot dismiss the noises so confidently now.
The footsteps move around again – searching, Odette assumes – and she lets them stew in it. They will find nothing.
‘Houses settle,’ says George eventually. ‘The winter weather means the wood contracts—’
‘Don’t patronise me,’ snaps Claudine. ‘Someone is doing this.’
Odette freezes.
‘A disgruntled servant still loyal to their old mistress. It is common trickery.’
God – a reprieve – but if Claudine were to sniff out her hiding place—
‘Oh, well, now, I hardly think one of the staff would do something so unkind.’
‘How wonderful for you.’ Claudine’s voice drips bile.
‘It has stopped now. To bed, I think.’
Odette cannot make out what Claudine says in response, but both sets of footsteps recede.
The moment the door closes, she hammers as hard and as long as she can.
The door is flung open again, crashing against the wall, and footsteps march in.
‘Whoever you are,’ cries Claudine, ‘I will find you out, and the punishment will be severe!’
Odette crouches and taps rapidly along the base of the wall, as though something is approaching the bed where one of Lydia’s sketches hangs above the headboard.
‘Stop it!’ shrieks Claudine. ‘I order you to stop it!’
‘Darling, calm down,’ says George.
‘Do not touch me!’
‘You’re getting overwrought.’
‘Of course I am overwrought, you fool – do you not hear this?’
‘I will admit it is unusual.’
‘If they mean to make me feel guilty, they will not succeed,’ snaps Claudine. ‘I have done nothing wrong!’
‘No one has said you have,’ says George soothingly.
‘I did what I had to! I lost twenty years of my life because of her – I will not lose the next twenty!’
Odette stops the noise at once.
What does Claudine mean by that?
But it is guilt – some sort of guilt.
Claudine takes the silence as success. ‘I will find out who you are, and you will be gone with no reference – I promise you that.’
George says something soft again, but Claudine interrupts.
‘This room will be completely stripped back and remade. You will engage the tradesmen tomorrow,’ she instructs.
‘Yes, darling.’
One set of footsteps leaves, and finally Odette risks peeking out around the edge of the wardrobe to take in Claudine, stood in the middle of the room, hair falling out of her plait, colour high in her cheeks.
Behind her, in the shadows, is a face.
Lydia’s gaunt and angular skull looms out as she emerges, one hand reaching for Claudine’s throat.
Claudine stiffens and spins around.
Lydia is gone.
Claudine flees.
Once the house is asleep once more, Odette squeezes out from her hiding place and patters back up to the studio.
Amongst the detritus of her dead mother’s half-life, she curls up and laughs and laughs and laughs.