Chapter 9
Odette
ODETTE IS PAINTED IN BLOOD.
It is hot and copper-smelling – tasting where it fills her mouth and spills over her lips – hot against her throat and wrists. Gunpowder is sharp in the air, and the shot has briefly deafened her.
Leo lies dead on the floor.
She does not know how it happened. The angle, the moment, whether it was her or him – she does not know.
The bullet has caught him under the jaw and burst out through his eye, like the bloom of a flower.
He slumps across the floor, wilted and limp, snuffed out so thoroughly.
The carpet beneath him soaks through with red, and red stains his cheeks, his collar.
He will not smirk again, not flick his cigarette ash in an empty teacup, or crack his neck or complain Lydia has made him too short in another painting.
Not Leo, no, not Leo. Do not let this be. She loved him once, and still, her brother-not-brother.
Where once there was light, there is now darkness.
Each star snuffed out one by one, till Odette is left all alone in the black.
How many dead bodies has she seen now?
How many her fault?
The ringing in her ears is so loud she cannot think.
What has happened?
Dead – dead again – all dead. Is she dead?
A cold hand grasps the back of her neck and shakes her.
Her mother brings her back.
She has seconds, maybe, before people arrive. The shot will have been heard throughout the house.
It cannot end now.
She is not finished. Not without Claudine.
On the landing she hears a commotion downstairs – people are coming, voices, a clamour.
Only a split second to make her decision – so she runs, breathless, shaking, up to one landing, then the next, and the next, this endlessly tall house, these endless, useless rooms. Here a vase her mother purchased on her honeymoon, here a print of her father riding in the Herne Hunt.
The sound of the gas burning follows her like a hissing crowd. She is the villain, she is wanted dead.
A scream comes from somewhere behind her.
They have found him.
What will they think?
A suicide?
It would not be so surprising, after all. Mother dead, sister drowned. A poor fool with no taste for life.
Claudine will know better.
In her mother’s studio at the top of the house, Odette stops at last, breathing hard, throat on fire with the effort. The lights have not been lit here, so she slips through the dark, between the broken fragments of her mother’s legacy. A torn canvas here, a broken brush there.
How long can she hide?
No – she cannot hide.
That will get her nowhere.
She has a better idea.
The subtlety of her hearing has slowly returned, and she listens more closely to the tumult of voices, all these new servants Claudine commands.
She is their mistress, but she stands alone.
They are not so mismatched now. Odette against Claudine. That is how it has been since her mother died.
Odette goes to the landing outside the studio and gives a knock on the banister.
It is not so loud.
She knocks again, slowly, steadily.
Does she have Claudine’s attention? She does not know.
She goes to the centre of the room and taps on the floorboards.
Tap-tap-tap.
There – a creak on the stairs below. Someone is coming up.
Someone scared.
Claudine knows it is a message just for her.
Tap-tap-tap.
Odette slinks back, towards the one window that is not yet fully boarded up. Rain lashes the glass, and the wind sends the tree branches outside clattering against the side of the house.
This time, she gives a quick and constant rapping, faster, louder, harder, until—
‘I am here.’
Claudine stands in the doorway.
Odette forgot how much taller she is than Lydia.
She is dressed to receive guests, in arsenic-green silk with midnight-blue voided velvet in a brocade pattern like snakeskin.
Odette crouches by the window, back against the glass, a washed-out shadow.
‘It is me you want,’ says Claudine. ‘Isn’t it?’
Still, Odette says nothing.
She thinks, briefly, how foolish it was of her to drop the gun. It would be clean and quick. One bullet for Claudine. One bullet for herself. All of it over.
Claudine is shaken, she cannot let the silence stand. ‘Messy, that you let so many others suffer and die for your impassioned cause.’
‘You killed only one person, I suppose,’ says Odette at last, a quiet voice in the night.
Claudine smiles coldly. ‘We have sent for the police. I did not think you would be foolish enough to do something so incriminating, but you are Lydia’s daughter. None too bright.’
What will she do, now she has Claudine? What does she want from her?
Her mother’s cold hand at her throat.
Yes: a confession. The truth.
For Claudine to pay.
Leant against the wall beside her is a length of broken picture frame in heavy mahogany. A nail juts from one end.
‘When the police come,’ Odette says, ‘will you tell them how you poisoned your sister? That is how you did it, is it not?’
‘Enough. Why do you not know when you are beaten?’
Claudine’s patience has snapped sooner than Odette expected, and she realises, abruptly, that Claudine is truly frightened. Odette wonders what she looks like, hunched and blood-smeared, wet hair plastered to her skull and nothing but desperation to drive her on.
Claudine is right to be afraid.
Odette smiles. ‘Are you so sure of your victory?’
‘There is no victory. Only fact,’ says Claudine, though her voice wavers.
‘George is my husband. This is my house. You are a child who has overstayed and refuses to grow up. Playing your silly little games with that lunatic Cecilia – you are a spoilt brat, and no one has had the courage to put you in your place.’
‘So you lock me up as a madwoman.’
Claudine bares her teeth. ‘I should have done it sooner. You have destroyed our lives – you have destroyed your father’s life. You should be on your knees, begging us all for forgiveness.’
‘And I should have realised sooner that you are a monster,’ says Odette. ‘Why am I such a threat to you?’
Her hand closes around the wood.
‘Yes,’ croons her mother. ‘Yes.’
‘You are not a threat,’ hisses Claudine. ‘You are the cuckoo I must oust from the nest, but you are ever the victim, aren’t you, stupid little Odette? You have had everything given to you while I have had to struggle and suffer and fight for any small scrap. I am owed this.’
‘Why must you take it from me?’
Claudine stalks into the room, eyes dark with fury. Odette wonders for a moment if she will strike first.
‘Take it from you? You were the one who took everything from me. You came along and took my fiancé from me, my home, my friends, my future, all because my whore of a sister could not let me have one thing of my own, could not let me be happy, be separate.’
For the first time, Odette falters. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t you know yet? Have you not worked it out? I thought you considered yourself so clever.’
Odette shakes her head. What – took what?
Claudine is shaking with rage as she speaks.
‘George was my fiancé. We were in love, we had been since we were very young. We were going to marry but – but Lydia never could stand to be excluded. If I had him, she had to have him, too, and then she was pregnant and that was that. I was thrown away, and she – you – took everything.’
Odette’s mind races. ‘That is why you left England.’
‘Yes, I left England,’ she echoes, mocking. ‘If you can call it that. I say driven out. Exiled. My sister stole my life – because of you – and now I have come to claim it back.’
Odette feels so small.
So stupid.
The ghost stands beside her, teeth bared in a snarl. ‘Murderer. Viper.’
‘By poisoning her.’
Claudine has stepped ever closer. The light from the window casts a long shadow of Odette across the floorboards, so that she has already blurred into one with Claudine.
‘You are wrong. You do not know how wrong you are.’
‘But you burnt the memorial. Why would you do that if not to hide evidence of your plot?’ Odette sounds to herself like a child, naive and frightened.
‘Because I was sick of your great performance of grief. As though no one had felt what you felt before. As if the world should stop and arrange itself around your pain.’ Claudine laughs bitterly. ‘Even after her death Lydia still found a way to ruin my life.’
Odette shakes her head. Tests her fingers around the wood. ‘I don’t believe you. I know you did something. She only became so gravely ill after you returned.’
Claudine throws her hands up. ‘Of course she did! Lydia was herself until the end. She could never let anyone have anything. She was like that from the second she could speak. If I had a new toy, she wanted it, if I ate a cake, she must take it from my plate. She stole my jewellery, my ribbons, my books. One year, on my birthday, she contrived to fall down the stairs so the whole day was spent worrying if poor, delicate Lydia was quite all right, and I was entirely forgotten about. If I had a single thing for myself she wanted it and knew exactly how to get it. That is what she did with George. She must have done; he would never have left me by choice. She seduced him, to take him from me.’
‘And you killed her to take him back.’
Claudine sneers. ‘Stupid, again. That was never the plan. George told me if I came home with him we could easily live together as we wanted to, and simply push Lydia out to the country. I was a fool to believe it would be so easy.’
Odette frowns. George asked Claudine to return to England?
Claudine notices the understanding dawn across Odette’s face with a satisfied look. ‘Oh yes. Begged me back. Found me in Germany on one of his business trips, and told me he could not live without me any longer.’
‘He wouldn’t.’
Wouldn’t he?
Odette does not know why she protests anymore.