Chapter 18
At Eloise’s there had been an orangery. Mostly it was full of dusty lemon trees and thatch palms, but in the southernmost corner, where the sun shone hottest, a sickly pomegranate grew.
When Eloise was being contrary—or, worse, if there was some sullen lordling with whom she had danced and exchanged frightfully dull small talk and was now, inexplicably, infatuated—Caroline had slipped away to this half-forgotten room and lost herself among its potted inhabitants.
They did not belong in this gray, rainy place, and Caroline loved to commiserate with them, especially the pomegranate, whose trunk was thin and bent but whose leaves were stubbornly glossy.
Once, when Eloise was lost in melancholy over a spotty boy who had gone away to London for the season and returned betrothed, Caroline had disappeared into the orangery and discovered that the pomegranate tree had sprouted a small red flower.
She returned to check on it whenever she visited Eloise, watching the bloom mutate into a strange, waxy thing with a fuzzy yellow center. She was sorry that whatever pollinated pomegranates—a Mediterranean species of bumblebee, perhaps?—would never find its way into this glass purgatory.
So she could not have been more surprised when, the next time she found an excuse to sneak away, the flower had transformed itself into a hard pink ball.
“Oh, well done!” Caroline had whispered to the little plant. “Well done, you!”
Week by week the fruit swelled, spurred on by an unseasonably hot spring, the condensation dripping from the glass ceiling, and, Caroline fancied, her own encouragement, until it split open with the pressure of its own juice.
She had wrapped it in her kerchief and made some excuse to leave before supper.
On the hillock between Eloise’s ostentatious manor and Audley House, Caroline had sat beneath an oak tree and eaten every last sweet-sour aril.
That was how Caroline’s head felt, when she finally came to. Like her skull was about to split open from the pressure of her overripe brain and reveal beads of fruit glowing like rubies.
—
For a long time, she had been aware of nothing. Then came the insistent, pounding pain, like a drumbeat. With every throb of blood through her veins it grew louder, closer, until it pulled her from sweet, deep unconsciousness like a body from the tide.
With a moan, Caroline cracked a bleary eye onto darkness.
She was alone. At least she heard nothing, no one, beside her in the black.
One by one, other sensations presented themselves: a terrible ache in her back, her neck. The hard wood beneath her. The sourness of her breath against the wall.
The night came back in blurry snatches.
The preparation for the supper, the anxious humming in her head growing louder with each hour that passed.
Rab in the kitchen, his eyes strangely bright in the gloom.
The cup of purple liquid. How it had burned as she swallowed, how it had doused her senses.
How it had pulled at her, dragged her down, promised rest.
There had been something she was supposed to do. Something important.
A strangled sound bubbled up from her throat as she remembered.
Her plan. Her plan to listen.
No. No, no, let her be wrong, let only moments have passed—
She got to her feet like a crone, gripping the banister.
She suppressed a groan as the blood rushed into her feet with a thousand needle pricks.
Each stair was high as a levee, each step taken on shaking joints.
She knew, by the pain in her body, by the cottony insides of her cheeks and her clenching stomach, that she had slept for hours.
Still, a desperate hope flickered in her chest.
No sound came from the closed dining room door. No band of light, no voices. Caroline put her hand on the knob, held her breath. Opened it.
The room was empty.
Chairs were pushed back at haphazard angles; two lay on their sides.
No one had bothered to clear the table. The candles were drowned in pools of wax.
Mrs. Easton’s starched tablecloth was stained with wine and grease and congealed globs of bordelaise.
The sky through the windows was gray and starless, the full face of the moon long set.
Caroline dropped into the closest chair.
She had missed it.
Despair clawed through her. She was no closer to discovering the secret of this place.
No closer to finding Charlie. The tonic had incapacitated her, just as it had Mary Jane; it still lingered, fogging the corners of her mind, making her slow, stupid.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw stars.
Had another woman been killed while she was sleeping?
The Dutch clock in the parlor chimed, and Caroline nearly jumped from her too-tight skin.
The brassy voice rang four times, then fell silent. Four in the morning, then; sunrise two hours away. No sounds came from the house overhead, no squeaking floorboards or sighing doors.
Caroline tiptoed to the sideboard, where a silver water pitcher gleamed with condensation. She raised the metal lip to her mouth, not caring that water splashed down her bodice. It was cold and sweet and put out the worst of the fire in her head.
When the pitcher was empty, when Caroline stood dripping and gulping air as she had gulped the water, she moved silently from the dining room into the parlor.
It, too, was empty, a half-drunk bottle of canary on the side table, a forgotten lamp illuminating the room with the last of its oil.
The rug before the door was mussed, the fringed edge folded back on itself.
The freshly waxed banister was smeared with handprints.
A dark pool stained the second stair. Caroline padded across the carpet and knelt, her pulse pounding at her temples, and dipped a finger into the dark liquid.
But it was only wine. She raised her head, gazed up into the mouth of darkness above her.
The first floor was silent, every door closed.
She kept climbing.
—
Once, while she was walking Audley House’s woods with Charlie, her brother had frozen. He placed a warning hand on her shoulder.
“What?” she had whispered, although a piece of her had sensed it, too, felt the hairs at the base of her skull stand at attention.
Charlie had raised his nose into the air like one of their father’s hounds, sniffed. And over the perfume of the woods—the sweetness of dead leaves, the mineral brightness of the earth—she had smelled it, too. Wet wool and urine. A musk that stung her nostrils.
“Wild boar,” he had whispered. Then, with his head on a swivel, he had led Caroline back the way they had come.
The smell on the second-floor landing was like that. Animal.
Ignoring the warning that hummed through her, Caroline stepped silently toward the door of the east wing.
It stood monolithic, dark and disapproving. In the predawn light, the deep marks across it looked like wounds. They reminded Caroline of John’s scarred face. Factory accident, Monsieur Rodart had said. She had doubted the story at the time. Now, somehow, she knew it was a lie.
No sound came from the room beyond.
Caroline lay her ear against the wood. It was smooth, patinaed with time, the iron straps cool beneath her fingertips. She listened for a long moment. But if anything lay on the other side, it was silent.
She glanced down the empty hallway, at the line of shut bedroom doors. Asleep, all of them. And if they had partaken of Rab’s liquor, as the stacked glasses on his tray implied, no small sound would wake them.
Caroline tugged on the lock, furtively at first, then in earnest. She leaned the entirety of her weight against the chain.
But it held firm. She dug a hairpin from her ruined chignon and thrust it into the keyhole.
She had never picked a lock before, but Charlie had told her a story of a boy at St. Mathew’s who used an old hatpin to steal their math professor’s secret bottle of whiskey.
It did not open. It did not so much as jiggle. And as Caroline realized she would never open the door without Mrs. Easton’s key, she realized, too, that the boy in Charlie’s story was, once again, Rab.
She hurled the hairpin down the dark hallway. It landed with a distant ping. She leaned her back against the door, dropped her face into her hands, and wept.
—
“Try again,” Charlie had said, whenever her leaf boat drowned in the stream, when a rotten tree branch snapped beneath her foot. “Just try again, Cat. Everyone fails. It’s those who keep going who succeed in the end.”
But what if she did not? What if she kept failing and failing until she gave herself away? What if she never saw her brother again?
There was so much Charlie had kept from her. His life here, this strange, secretive society of men. Mary Jane, the woman he so clearly loved, had promised to marry. And Rab. Rab, who had been like his brother.
Caroline pulled back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and pulled on the version of herself her brother had captured in his notebooks.
She had a clear enemy in this fight. Rab had drugged her, had drugged Mary Jane. He was the last person Charlie saw before he disappeared. And he was connected to the murders. She just knew it.
“Sleep well?” Caroline called false-cheerily as Mrs. Easton emerged on the top cellar stair. It was full morning, nearly nine, the light cold and bright through the windows.
Mrs. Easton winced. “Must you shout, Miss Huxley?” Her eyes were red-rimmed and shadowed, her knuckles white on the banister. “The guests were up all hours. I didn’t get to bed till three.”
“Is that so?” Caroline asked innocently. “I heard nothing. The water’s hot; can I make you some tea?”
Mrs. Easton lurched across the flagstones on stiff legs and dropped into her favorite chair. “Yes, please.” She looked about, taking in the clean counters, the bubbling stock on the stove. “You’ve been busy.”