Chapter 6
Odette
ODETTE DOES NOT SLEEP, but it feels better that way. To sleep is to be weak. If she loses the thread she is following, she may not find it again.
This morning, her mother is in the garden, standing sentinel beside the apple tree, staring up at her with blank, black eyes.
She is trying her best. She knows her mother understands.
She loses the morning somehow, and then it is lunchtime, and she brings herself to leave her room.
Claudine is alone in the entrance hall when Odette slips down the stairs. She is stood close to the wall, concentrating on the floor. At first, Odette cannot understand what she is doing, but then she sees she has cornered a mouse.
Odette stays quiet, tucked in the half-landing, waiting for Claudine to call for a maid.
But she does not.
She simply lifts her foot and brings it down on the mouse with force.
When she is done, she scrapes her shoe on the mat and goes into the dining room with a perfectly placid expression.
It is the most profoundly disturbing thing Odette has ever seen, and she thinks she might be sick.
If she had any doubt that Claudine was dangerous, she has none now.
She pelts upstairs again, only just making it back to her room and her chamber pot in time before she throws up.
By the time she comes downstairs again, the mouse corpse has been disappeared by an unseen servant.
George, Claudine and Odette sit at the table in silence. Odette can hardly breathe. The only thing keeping her steady is that she can feel the press of her mother’s hand holding hers, just as it did at the séance, cold and bony and stronger than it ever was in life.
She is not alone. She will not let them destroy Lydia.
The silence is such that snatches of the maids’ conversation drift in from the hall.
‘What if it was a restless spirit? It would make a certain sense if Mrs Fairfax-Waugh didn’t want to go so easily . . .’
Claudine puts down her glass with an audible clink. ‘Edith, Agnes – you will present yourself to me in the morning room after lunch,’ she calls, with a voice like cracking ice.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ There is the sound of footsteps as both girls disappear.
Odette feels sorry for them. She cannot protect anyone. She does not know if she can even save Cecilia.
She knows she cannot save herself.
‘A delivery, sir.’ The butler enters the room and hands her father a flat package wrapped in brown paper.
‘Ah. The photographs.’ George unties the string and removes the prints, then hesitates. ‘Oh dear.’
‘What is it?’ Claudine leans over to see, but George holds the prints out of her grasp. ‘Stop that.’
She snatches the pictures from him, and there is only a fraction of a second between her looking at them and the colour draining from her face.
‘Don’t look.’
She does not fight when George takes them back, putting them face down on the table.
Odette watches closely. Claudine has gone so grey she thinks she might faint – and a moment later, she does, slipping sideways from her chair onto the floor, pulling the tablecloth with her.
The crash brings servants flying into the room, and Odette skips back, away from the chaotic scene. It is almost something Lydia would have painted: the bright slash of colour in Claudine’s limp form, the gathering of servants and husband like some great image from antiquity.
The photographs have fluttered to the floor, landing off to one side. Odette kneels on the moth-eaten Turkish rug that Lydia loved too much to throw out and picks them up.
They are of George and Claudine, newly wed and standing together in a photographer’s studio, their hands clasped together, with an elaborate painted backcloth behind them showing a window overlooking a continental square, beyond the drape of a curtain. They look very fine, and it is expensive work.
Of course, it is perfectly marred by the ghost.
Odette runs her finger over the surface, tracing the outline of her mother’s face.
She appears there, in between George and Lydia, eyes closed and face blank, just as she did in that final photograph they took together after her death. It is as though she has refused to leave the bounds of her marriage and now presents herself as the irrefutable third party to an unspeakable act.
Claudine has come to and is clutching a bottle of smelling salts as she is carefully manoeuvred upright. There is a tightness around her mouth that conveys a real fear, and her hands are white at the knuckle where she holds the bottle.
Interesting.
Claudine seems to sense Odette’s eyes on her and she turns, face narrowing in anger. ‘Spiteful, horrible child. You did this. I know it was you.’
‘Now, that is a little much,’ says George. ‘It is a mistake at the photography studio, surely.’
‘Oh, you dismiss me too easily, George,’ says Claudine. ‘You make all sorts of excuses for her when this so clearly oversteps the mark.’
‘If Odette did this, then yes, it does, but for goodness’ sake, everyone, you take it far too seriously.’
‘Don’t you dare defend her. This is beyond some servant’s trick.’ She rounds on Odette. ‘I suppose that was you last night as well.’
Odette stares at her blankly. ‘What do you have to fear from my mother’s ghost?’ she asks. ‘If you have not wronged her, then she has no business with you.’
‘How dare you—’ Claudine surges up, but George restrains her with a hand on her shoulder.
‘Easy now. You should rest.’
‘If you are hiding something,’ says Odette, ‘then there is nowhere you can hide from the dead.’
For a moment, Odette thinks Claudine will push past George and corner her where she kneels by the photographs, but it seems that Claudine is mollified, at least for the moment, by the press of George’s hand and the gesture of care.
‘You are right. My nerves have been too greatly taxed these last days.’ She gives George a dark look. ‘I have had quite enough.’
She takes the smelling salts upstairs, and George repairs to his study.
Odette watches them go.
She witnessed real fear in Claudine’s face. It was subtle, yes, but it was there.
Alone in the dining room, the cold of the floorboards seeping up through her stockings, Odette examines the picture again.
The photographer did a fine job. It took most of the money she had in her purse when she slipped out to the studio yesterday to persuade him to create a double exposure with the plates from Lydia’s death portrait, but his work has been far more effective than she could have imagined.
The image is uncanny, the half-formed shape of her mother so like a spirit, like an angel.
Claudine saw something more in it. A pointed finger. An accusation.
There was fear – and guilt.
It is only a matter of time before she slips. One more push, and she will go over the edge.
Odette is sure, for a moment, that she can feel icy fingertips against her throat – then her cheek. A caress.
Her mother is with her. Her mother is pleased.