Sleep, Pale Sister

40

They came together now, like ghostly twins, their faces merging one into the other so that for an instant Effie would stare at me through my daughter’s eyes, or Marta’s laughter filter through the veil of Effie’s smile. At last she was there, almost visible, and it seemed that my heart would burst for love of her, love of them both. She was happy now, happier than she had ever been before, knowing that she had come home, that she was safe with her mother again, safe with her sister. Since the night I asked her to name the Hermit I had not needed her memories: that part of her slept, sinking deeper into the murk of things best left forgotten, and she had stopped dreaming of the Bad Man and what he did to her long ago. In fact, with the help of my potions she remembered very little.

She was content to sleep in her room with her books and toys around her; she played with Meg and Alecto and, when Henry came, she played with him, too. Every visit dragged him deeper; we dosed him with chloral and strong aphrodisiacs, flayed him with kisses which left him gasping on the floor long after Marta had left the room. He lost his power to distinguish reality from fiction and I am certain that if I had shown him Effie in her undisguised form he would not have recognized her. Her body had grown thin and sores bloomed on her arms and chest; but Henry was beyond noticing them. My Marta shone through Effie’s flesh, transcending it, growing strong; and he was hers, all hers. I watched him become vague-eyed and listless as weeks passed, jumping at shadows, and my heart was filled with black rejoicing as we fed on him, my daughter and I. Don’t let anyone tell you vengeance isn’t sweet: it is. I know.

Mose came to see me twice. His creditors wouldn’t wait for ever, he told me, and he didn’t understand what we were waiting for. I lent him fifty pounds to tide him over and he seemed happy enough to play along for a while. Soon, I told him. Soon.

Just give my Marta time to grow.

Five more weeks passed and on five more Thursdays Henry Chester stumbled blindly up the steps of my house into a nightmarish rapture of lust. She walked right through him, my wraith, emptying him of all his assurance, his pretentious male superiority, his religious bigotry, his icons and his dreams. If he had not been Henry Chester I could have pitied him, but the thought of my sad little ghost and what she had once been cleared my head of all ambiguity. He had had no pity for my Marta.

Those five weeks saw the fleeting of a grey, lustreless autumn; winter came early and a hard, ringing black wind brought ice to the roads and tore the sky into dark, tattered streamers of grey. I remember Christmas decorations in the London shops, fir trees on Oxford Street and tinsel along the gaslamps, but at Crook Street the windows and doors stayed unadorned. We would celebrate later.

Henry came for the last time on 22 December: night fell at three that afternoon and by nine the thin rain had turned to sleet and then to snow, barely whitening the cobbles before turning black. Perhaps it was going to be a white Christmas after all. Effie came early, wrapped to the eyes in her thick cloak; I looked at the sky and almost turned her away, thinking that Henry would never come on such a bleak, dreadful night. But Marta’s faith was greater than mine.

‘He’ll come,’ she said with impish assurance, ‘especially tonight.’

Oh, my lovely Marta! Her smile was so beautiful that I was tempted to abandon my revenge. Wasn’t it enough to have her again, to hold her in my arms and feel her cool skin against my cheek? Why risk that for a sterile victory over a man already damned?

But of course I knew why.

For the moment she was still his. In his eyes half of her was still Effie, and she would never fully be mine until he abandoned his claim. While he continued to see them as separate individuals they could never be truly united, never return to the good, safe place they had left. They would be two floating halves, disintegrating slowly in a void of forgetfulness from which only a mother’s love could drag them. She had to be freed.

‘Marta.’

Her smile from behind Effie’s viridescent gaze was radiant.

‘Whatever happens, remember how much I love you.’

I felt her little hand creep into the warm hollow of my neck.

‘I promise it will soon be over, darling,’ I whispered, my arms around her, ‘I promise.’

I felt her smile against my skin.

‘I know, Mother,’ she said. ‘I love you, too.’

41

After that confrontation, my wife was the enemy: a soft shadow watching with cold, verdigris eyes as I moved through our haunted house. She had grown mantis-thin in spite of the quantities of sweetmeats she ate, drifting like a drowned mermaid through the thick green air of the gas-jets. I did what I could to avoid touching her, but she seemed to take pleasure in brushing against me as often as she could, and her touch was like winter fog. She hardly spoke to me but murmured to herself in a thin, childish voice; sometimes, as I lay awake at night, I fancied I could hear her singing in the dark: nursery rhymes and schoolyard chants and a French lullaby she had sung when she was a little girl:

‘Aux marches du palais…

Aux marches du palais…

’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà

’Y a une si belle fille…’

I spoke with Russell once more, and I allowed myself to be persuaded, with sighs and the suggestion of a few manly tears, that the only hope of a cure for my darling Effie was a spell of close supervision at some reputable hospice. I flinched visibly at the good doctor’s hint that grief at the loss of her child might have permanently unhinged Effie’s mind, but demurred when it was forcibly brought home that if I did not act soon Effie might do something to seriously injure herself. With an outwardly clouded brow and a hot, inward grin I signed a paper, which the doctor countersigned, and I tucked it carefully into my wallet when I left. On the way home I stopped at my club for lunch-for the first time in weeks-and ate ravenously. Over my glass of brandy I allowed myself the rare luxury of a cigar. I was celebrating.

It was almost dark when I reached Cromwell Square, though when I looked at my watch it was only ten past three. The wind had risen, blowing drifts of black leaves hither and thither across the roads, and I thought I felt the sting of sleet against my face as I paid the hackney and hurried indoors. A freezing catspaw of gritty wind clutched at my coat-tails as I opened the door, sending a flurry of dead leaves into the house ahead of me; I slammed the door against the dark, shivering. There might be snow tonight.

I found Effie in the unlit drawing-room, sitting beside the empty grate with her tapestry discarded across her knees. The window, absurdly, was open and the wind blew directly into the room. Dead leaves littered the floor. For a brief, nightmarish moment the old terror overwhelmed me again, the feeling of helpless diminishment, as if for all her Gothic pallor and ghostly appearance she had somehow made me a ghost in my own house, myself the wraithlike drifter and she the solid, living flesh. Then I remembered the paper in my wallet and the world reasserted itself. With an impatient exclamation and two steps forwards I rang the bell for Tabby, forcing myself to speak to Effie as I squinted at the grey blur of her face in the dark.

‘Now, Effie,’ I chided. ‘What are you thinking of, sitting here in the freezing cold? You’ll catch your death. And what is Tabby thinking of letting you stay here with no fire? How long have you been here?’ She turned towards me, a half-girl, her face bisected by the slice of gaslight from the passage.

‘Henry.’ Her voice was as flat and colourless as the rest of her. In the bizarre dislocation of her features only half her mouth seemed to move: one eye fixed mine, pupil drawn to a pinprick against the light.

‘Don’t you fret, my dear,’ I continued, ‘Tabby will be here presently. I’ll make sure she lights a nice fire for you, and then you can have some hot chocolate. We don’t want you to catch a chill now, do we?’

‘Don’t we?’ I fancied there was a faintly sardonic intonation in her voice.

‘Of course not, my dear,’ I replied briskly, fighting an urge to gabble. ‘Tabby! Drat the woman, she should be here by now. Tabby! Does she want you to freeze to death?’

‘Tabby’s gone out,’ said Effie softly. ‘I told her to go to the chemist’s for my drops.’

‘Oh.’

‘There’s nobody else. Em has the afternoon off. Edwin has gone home. We’re alone, Henry.’

The unreasoning terror swept over me again and I struggled to keep control. For some reason the thought of being alone with Effie, at the mercy of whatever strange thoughts were playing through her mind, appalled me. I fumbled in my pocket for my cigar-lighter, forced myself to turn my back to her as I struggled to light the lamp…I felt her eyes like nails in the back of my neck and my jaw cramped with hatred of her.

‘That’s better, isn’t it? Now we can see each other.’ That was right: brisk informality. No need to feel that she had somehow planned a confrontation; no reason to think that somehow she already knew…I turned to face her again, my jaw now aching with a smile I knew did not fool her for a minute.

‘I’ll close the window,’ I said.

I took as long as I dared over the latch, the curtain, the leaves on the floor. I threw the leaves into the grate. ‘I wonder if I could get the fire going.’

‘I’m not cold,’ said Effie.

‘But I am,’ I replied with false cheerfulness. ‘Let’s see…it can’t be difficult. Tabby does it every day.’ I knelt down in front of the grate and began to arrange the papers and dry sticks on the coals. There was a brief flare and crackle, then the chimney began to smoke.

‘Dear me,’ I laughed, ‘there must be more of a knack to this than I thought.’

Effie’s lips twisted in a knowing, hateful half-smile. ‘I’m not a child,’ she spat suddenly. ‘Nor am I a half-wit. You don’t have to talk to me as if I were.’

Her reaction was so abrupt that I was again taken aback. ‘Why, Effie,’ I began foolishly, ‘I…’ Collecting myself I made my voice crisply patient, like a doctor’s. ‘I can see you are ill,’ I said. ‘I can only say that I hope later you will realize quite how hurtful and ungrateful your words seem to me. However, I-’

‘Nor am I ill,’ interrupted Effie once more-and for that moment I believed it: her eyes were as sharp and bright as scalpels-‘In spite of everything you have said and done to prove me otherwise, I am not ill. Please, don’t bother to try to lie to me, Henry. We’re alone in the house; there is no-one for you to perform to but yourself. Try to be honest, for both our sakes.’ Her voice was dry and emotionless, like a governess’s, and for a moment I was twelve again, blustering falsely and naively to try and save myself from punishment, every word fixing my guilt deeper and deeper.

‘You have no right to talk to me like that!’ My voice sounded weak even to myself, and I strained to keep the authority in my tones. ‘There are limits to my patience, Effie, even though I make great allowances for your behaviour. You owe me respect as a wife, if nothing else, and-’

‘Wife?’ exclaimed Effie, and I was oddly reassured to hear a shrill note creep into her measured tones. ‘Since when did you ever want me to be a wife? If I were to tell what you…’

‘Tell what?’ My voice was too loud but it seemed the words were beyond my control. ‘That I’ve nursed you when you were sick, borne your tantrums, given you everything you have ever wanted? I-’

‘My Aunt May always said it wasn’t decent for you to marry a girl so much younger. If she knew…’

‘Knew what?’

Her voice was a whisper. ‘Knew how you treat me…and where you go in the middle of the night…’

‘You’re raving, girl. Go where, for Heaven’s sake?’

‘You know. Crook Street.’

I gasped. How could she have known? Could someone have recognized me? Could I have been followed? The implications of what she knew flooded over me. It couldn’t be. She was bluffing.

‘You’re mad!’

She shook her head silently.

‘You’re mad, and I can prove it!’ Feverishly I reached into my coat pocket, dragging out Russell’s paper. I read it aloud in breathy snatches, sick euphoria coursing through my veins: “‘…that the patient, Euphemia Madeleine Chester…evidence too great to be ignored…mania, hysteria and catalepsy…dangerous to self and to others…hitherto recommend indefinite treatment…hands of…equipped to…” You heard what he said: I can have you sent to an asylum, Effie, an asylum for the insane! No-one will believe an insane woman. No-one!’

There was no expression on her face, just a terrible blankness. For a moment I wondered whether she had heard me, or whether she had retired once more into her strange unguessed-at thoughts. But when she spoke her voice was very calm.

‘I always knew you’d betray me, Henry,’ she said.

I tried to speak; but after all, she was right: there was no-one to perform to but myself.

‘I knew you didn’t love me any more.’ She smiled and for a moment looked almost beautiful. ‘But that’s all right, because I haven’t loved you for a long time.’ She tilted her head as if remembering something. ‘But I won’t let you sacrifice me, Henry. I won’t let you lock me up. I’m not ill and soon enough someone will realize that. Then maybe people will begin to believe what I say.’ She flicked me a glance which seemed ridden with malice. ‘And I could tell them so much, Henry,’ she added levelly. ‘The house in Crook Street and what goes on there…Fanny Miller wouldn’t lie for you, would she?’

My breath was a mouthful of needles in my throat, my chest tightening unbearably. Suddenly, desperately, I needed my chloral. Heedless of Effie’s triumphant smile I grabbed the vial from around my neck and wrenched out the stopper. With shaking hands I poured ten drops into a glass and topped the glass with sherry. The glass was too full: some of the drink spilled, running down on to my cuff. A sudden, exquisite hatred welled up inside me.

‘No-one would believe such an outlandish tale.’ My voice was level again, and my relief was immense.

‘I think they might,’ she said. ‘Besides, think of the scandal just as your work is beginning to gain recognition. The very hint that you had tried to put your wife in an asylum to prevent her from exposing your secret vice…it would ruin you. Would you risk that?’

I thanked whatever dark gods there were for the chloral; already it seemed as if the lid of my head had been lifted and a draught of cold air blown in, reducing my thoughts to the size of motes in the wind. I heard my voice speaking from a great distance.

‘My dear Effie, you’re overwrought. I think you should lie down and wait for Tabby to bring your drops.’

‘I won’t lie down!’ Realizing her advantage was somehow gone Effie lost her eerie composure and her voice had a sharp edge of hysteria.

‘Well, don’t lie down then, dear,’ I replied. ‘Far be it from me to coerce you. I’ll go down and see if Tabby has come back yet.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘Of course I believe you, my dear. Of course I do.’

‘I can ruin you, Henry.’ (Her voice wavered even as she tried to control it: ‘ru-in you, H-henry.’) ‘I can and I will!’ But the ghostly figure with the soft, cold voice and the verdigris eyes had gone, and the threat was empty. Tears silvered her face and her hands were shaking. I brushed the paper in my breast pocket and allowed myself the luxury of a smile.

‘Sleep well, Effie.’

And, as I turned away into the gaslit passage, I felt a clenched fist tighten beneath my ribcage; tightening joyfully, cruelly. I’d never let her touch us, Marta and me. Never.

I’d see her dead, first.

I arrived at Crook Street twenty minutes late with the throat of the storm funnelled at my back. There was snow on the cobbles, melting into the winter rubbish to form a thick, oily sludge which made the hackney’s wheels slip and skid on the corners. I was oddly serene in spite of the evening’s confrontation with Effie-I had taken a second dose of chloral before setting off.

With Marta at my journey’s end Effie was hardly in my mind: tomorrow I would arrange for her to be taken to a good nursing-home at some distance from London where no-one would listen to her ravings-and if they did, my exemplary public life would surely exonerate me from all suspicion: she was, after all, only a woman, and an artist’s model at that. I might be pitied for the failure of my marriage, but I would not be blamed. Besides…she was ill. Maybe more ill than any of us thought. On a night like this I felt that almost anything might happen.

The door of Number 18 fanned open in a quarter of rosy light; shaking off morbid thoughts, I entered, leaving a trail of frozen mud behind me on the doorstep. Fanny was in magnolia silk and zephyr gauze; looking absurdly virginal, like a young bride, and I wondered uneasily about the limitless powers of women to appear as men wish to see them. Even Marta.

Even Marta.

What bleak secrets did her perfect flesh conceal?

Wordless, I followed Fanny’s whispering train to the very eaves of the house: the attics, the box-rooms. As I realized where she was leading me I felt a sudden horror, as if she might throw open the door of the little attic bedroom to reveal the same scene; the toys on the floor, the white bed, the flowers on the bedstand and that whore’s child naked beneath her nightdress, unchanged but a little pale after all those years in her dark vault, holding out her arms and calling out to me in Marta’s blurred voice…

My own voice was brittle as icing: ‘Why do I have to go right up here? Why can’t we go into one of the parlours?’

Fanny ignored my incivility. ‘This is Marta’s own room, Henry,’ she explained reasonably. ‘She especially asked for you to be brought up here.’

‘Oh.’ My words were a tangle of wires in my mouth. ‘I…if she doesn’t mind, I’d rather not…isn’t it rather gloomy up here? And cold. It’s very cold in this part of the house. Maybe…’

‘The room is Marta’s choice,’ replied Fanny inexorably. ‘If you were to snub her in this, I don’t think she would accept to see you again.’

‘Oh.’ There was nothing more to say. I tried a jovial smile which felt more like a grimace. ‘I…I hadn’t quite understood. Certainly, if Marta…’

But Fanny had already turned away, her train dragging on the stairs. The floor looked as if no-one ever disturbed the dust by their passage. I looked at the door, almost expecting to see the blue-and-white enamel knob of my mother’s dressing-room. I shook the thought away before it could reach my precarious chloral-induced self-control. What nonsense. There was no blue-and-white knob, no pale little whore’s child with dark accusing eyes and chocolate around her mouth; there was only Marta, Marta, Marta, Marta…I put my hand on the knob, noticing the chipped white paint revealing the spectres of underlying layers…green, yellow, red…but not blue, I thought triumphantly, not blue. And beside my hand against the paint I saw the prints of small fingers, as if a child had paused there, pressing a palm and three fingers against the panels…Marta?

Even her hands could not be that small. And the marks, sticky, blurred impressions, fresh against the white. Could they be…chocolate?

My self-control collapsed. I screamed and pushed against the door with all my strength. It did not open. There was no room in my mind for thought: an insane logic compelled me, a sudden conviction that after all these years, this was how God intended me to pay for what I had done to the whore’s child…to pay with Marta. The image was dreadfully plausible to my disordered brain: the whore’s child with her hand on the door, listening; entering to find Marta waiting for me. Leaving again, her revenge taken…and Marta still waiting with her dress pulled up over her face…

I screamed again and began to pound against the panels with my bruised fists. ‘Marta! Marta! M-m…’

Then the door opened into darkness. My momentum carried me into the room and crashed me against the far wall as the door swung shut behind me. For a moment the darkness was absolute and I continued to scream, certain now that the ghostchild was in the room with me, so cold, so white, and still wanting her story.

A light flared. For a moment I was blinded, then I saw her standing by the window, the lamp in her hand. My relief was so great that I almost passed out, great black blooms patterning my vision.

‘Marta.’ I tried to keep the relief from my voice. ‘I…I’m sorry. I’m…not quite myself today.’ I grinned weakly.

‘As a matter of fact, Mr Chester, neither am I.’ Her smile was small and mischievous, her voice a whisper of hay and summer sky. ‘Perhaps we both need a drink.’

As she poured the drinks I watched her, feeling my heartbeat slow to almost normal, and before long I was able to look around.

The room was quite bare. A narrow bed with a white coverlet, a bedstand with a ewer and basin, a small table and a shabby armchair were all the furnishings there and, by the light of the single lamp, everything looked all the more bleak. There were no rugs on the bare boards, no pictures on the walls, no curtains. And today Marta herself was like her room, dressed in a plain white nightgown, barefoot, with her hair loose and partly shielding her face. For a moment I began to feel uneasy once more-the similarities to that other night were too strong-as if this, too, were another of her disguises designed to push me off-balance into permanent insanity. But when she put her arms around me she was warm and lightly scented with simple, childish fragrances: soap and lavender and something sweet like liquorice; she who had overwhelmed me with heady, exotic sensations was now the most elementary of juvenile seductresses, a shy, eager virgin of fourteen, delightfully untutored, painfully sincere.

And of course I knew that this, too, was one of her disguises: the essential Marta was as unknown to me now as it had ever been. But I gave myself up to the illusion of tenderness, and as we lay like children in each other’s arms she whispered a little story into my ear: the story of a man who falls in love with a dead woman’s portrait, who buys it and hides it in his attic for fear his wife might ask questions. Every day he visits the portrait, growing more and more melancholy, unable to give up the pleasure he feels gazing upon it. His wife begins to suspect and one day she follows him up into his secret place and watches him as he sits in front of the portrait. Seized with jealousy she waits until he has gone, then she takes a knife and goes up to the hated picture, meaning to slash it to pieces. But the picture is haunted by the soul of the dead woman and, as her rival comes at her with the knife, she leaps at her. There is a struggle, but the ghostwoman has the strength of desperation. The poor wife is driven shrieking out of her body into chaos and the ghostwoman, taking the other’s life for herself, calmly goes down the stairs to join her new lover.

I shivered as the story ended. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Marta?’ I asked.

I felt her nod against my bare skin, and I thought she laughed softly. The laugh made me uneasy, and it was with a touch of anger that I replied: ‘There are no ghosts. People don’t come back to haunt the living. I don’t believe people go anywhere after they’re dead.’

‘Not even Heaven?’

‘Especially not Heaven.’

‘So…’ Her voice was teasing: ‘You’re not afraid of the dead?’

‘Why should I be afraid? I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’ My face was burning and I wondered whether she could feel it. ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

‘All right.’ Her acceptance was childlike. ‘Then tell me about your day.’ I laughed outright at that: hearing that wifely phrase in her mouth!

‘No, tell me,’ she insisted.

So I told her: perhaps more than I intended. She was soft and childish in my arms, silent but for occasional little sounds of acquiescence. I told her about Effie and how I had come to dread her; my almost superstitious feeling of being a ghost in my own home; my decision to remove Effie to an asylum where she would no longer be a threat; my conviction that she could destroy me. Effie knew about us now-though how she knew I could not imagine-Effie, the enemy, the silent watcher from the shadows, the ghostchild…the ghost. Effie, who should have stayed asleep, who should have died: Effie, who should have been dead…

After a while I forgot I was talking to Marta but imagined myself instead before God’s throne, bargaining desperately with Him in His sublime and stupid indifference, bargaining for my life…

I had no right: I know that now. I took Effie before she was even old enough to understand what love was. I cheated her of her own chance at happiness. I twisted her to suit my own twisted appetites, then cut her away when I tired of her.

I know what I am.

And yet, with Marta in my arms, feeling the soft moisture of her breath against my skin, I seemed to glimpse another possibility, one which raised the hairs on my arms in a delicate, ecstatic self-loathing. The words I had spoken to Marta rang on in the hollow of my skull, sweet and taut as the invisible harp behind my eyelids:

‘There are no ghosts. People don’t come back to haunt the living. I don’t believe people go anywhere after they’re dead.’ I realized I had repeated the words aloud, interrupting the flow of agonized self-analysis. But I could not remember a word of what I had spoken.

Marta was watching me, appraising. Her face was stone. ‘Henry.’

Suddenly I knew what she was going to say and I flinched, caught in the beam of her deathly gaze. I began to speak, not caring what I was saying, anything to prevent her from speaking the words, the word I could hear resonating pitilessly…

‘Henry.’

I turned. She was inescapable.

‘Do you remember the day you told me you loved me?’

I nodded mutely.

‘You made me a promise. Did you mean it?’

I hesitated. ‘I…’

‘Did you mean it?’

‘Yes.’ My head was pounding, my mouth flooded with a sourness like raw gin.

‘Listen to me, Henry.’ Her voice was low, compelling, intimate as death. ‘You don’t love her any more. You love me now. Don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘For as long as she’s there I’ll never be yours. You’ll always have to hide. Always come in secret.’

My breath fluttered through dry lips in an unspoken half-protest, but the terrible purity of her gaze silenced me.

‘You say she knows about us already: she knows she can ruin you. Even to lock her up-if you could do it-might not be enough. She might talk, might make people listen. Do you think her family wouldn’t believe her? There’d be a scandal, whether they did or not. Mud would stick, Henry.’

‘I…’ The knowledge of what she was going to say was like a wall of rushing fire in my brain. What was worse, I wanted her to say it, to loose the wolves inside my skull. Sweet Scheherazade! My head swam deliriously. She was talking about murder: she was talking about silencing Effie for ever…

For a moment I gave myself entirely up to the images which fluttered through my mind and discovered within myself a kind of arousal at the thought of murder; a feeling so intense that it almost eclipsed my longing for Marta…then Marta’s enchantment reasserted itself and I flung my arms around her, burying my face in the sweetness and softness of her, the scent of lilac and chocolate…I think I was crying.

‘Oh, Marta…’

‘I’m sorry, Henry. I really have loved you, and you’ll never know what these nights together have meant to me…’

From my abyss I felt my mind questioning frantically; what did she mean? It almost sounded as if…

‘…but after this I know that we can’t see each other again. I…’

The numbness dropped over all my senses like a frozen blanket. Only the small helpless voice in my mind kept repeating stupidly: this is goodbye, this isn’t what she was meant to say, this is…No! It couldn’t be that! This wasn’t the word I was expecting from her! This wasn’t the promise I wanted to keep. Hysteria welled up in me. From a great distance I could hear my own voice beginning to laugh; a screaming, shrilling laughter like a mad clown’s.

‘No! No! Anything for you…anything…everything…’ The most terrible thing. ‘It doesn’t have to be this…’ O my Marta, my cold Gethsemane…‘I’ll do anything!’

At last she had heard me. She turned her face into the light, meeting my eye. I repeated my words so that she would know I was telling the truth: ‘I’ll do anything.’

She nodded slowly, frail and implacable. I forced my voice into something like control.

‘Effie is ill,’ I said. ‘She may not live long. She takes laudanum all the time. Sometimes she forgets how much she has taken.’

Marta was watching me still, her eyes eldritch as a cat’s.

‘She might die…at any time.’

It wasn’t enough: as her gaze flicked away from mine I knew it; she was no Effie, grasping at shadows. I had promised her everything.

Desperately I blurted out the hateful words, cowardly admission of my already accepted guilt.

‘No-one need ever know.’

The silence rang between us.

We sealed it as are traditionally sealed all the Devil’s bargains. Imagine if you can the God’s-eye view: Chester moaning on his rack of barbed flesh with the voice of a demon sweet in his ears-how He must have laughed! I gave my soul for a woman; how that immortal champion of the absurd must have rocked with laughter as our voices rose up out of the night to Him like flies…and how little I cared. Marta was my soul.

After my initial confession I found her terrifyingly practical. It was she who thought of the details, the plan with which you are already, no doubt, familiar. Quite coldly she outlined my part in her soft, whispering voice, her little hands like ice against my skin.

It would be quite simple. The next day I would go to the studio as usual to work, returning when night fell. I would instruct Tabby to give Effie her drops as usual. After dinner when Effie went to her room I would bring her a cup of chocolate as I often did, lacing it heavily with laudanum and a little brandy to hide the drug’s medicinal smell. Effie would fall into a heavy sleep which would deepen and deepen until she stopped breathing: a painless release. When it was safe to go out without being seen I would carry her outside where a friend of Marta’s would be ready to help me with a hired carriage. We would drive to the cemetery and take the body to a convenient vault, which we would open with tools provided by Marta’s friend. We would place the body inside and reseal the tomb, with no-one the wiser. If we made sure to choose a family with no living descendants we could be certain that our tampering with the grave would never be discovered. I would be able to tell the police that my wife was mentally ill-Russell would certainly vouch for that-and prone to erratic behaviour. I would play the part of the anxious husband, and eventually the case would be forgotten. We would be free of her at last.

I was uneasy about only one detail: my proposed accomplice. I understood that I needed someone to help me carry the body and someone to keep a watch in the cemetery, but Marta refused to tell me whom she had in mind, saying that I should trust her. Finally she grew angry, accusing me of trying to find excuses for my cowardice. I remember her sitting on the bare white bed with her legs tucked under her body like Rossetti’s Virgin Mary, her hair wild about her shoulders and her fists clenched like flints.

‘You’re afraid!’ she spat contemptuously. ‘You promise and promise…if thoughts were sins you’d be in Hell by now-but when it comes to one real action you simper and sigh like a girl! Do you think I wouldn’t do it? Do you?’

‘Marta…’ I pleaded.

Her rage was marvellous, all fire and poison.

‘Maa-rtaaa,’ she mocked cruelly. ‘Mmm-aaar-taaaa…’ Suddenly I was twelve again, in the schoolyard, my face pressed into the corner of the doorway, the taste of tears and hate in my mouth (cry-baby, cry-ba-aby, look at the ba-by cry…), and I felt my vision doubling briefly as the tears began to flicker down my cheeks. I could not comprehend her sudden cruelty. For some reason Marta was enraged.

‘Is that all you can do?’ she screamed bitterly. ‘Cry? I ask you to free yourself, to free me, and you stand there like a thwarted schoolboy? I wanted a man, a lover, and you give me nothing! I ask you for blood and you give me water!’

‘M…M-m…’ For a moment I almost said ‘Mother’. The snarl of wires in my mouth had become a broken harp, an Aeolian cavern of pain and confusion. I felt the left side of my face twitch uncontrollably, my eyelid a trapped butterfly beneath my tortured flesh.

Her contempt was too much to endure. I screamed with all the love and hate in my swollen heart. What words there were in my scream-if they were words-I do not know.

But there was a promise; relenting, she kissed me.

I am what I am.

42

As soon as I saw him leave Marta’s room and stumble downstairs, I knew our time had come. He had shed his brittle control, the icy, contemptuous mask of his respectability; and what remained had no features, no pretences, simply the stupid scream of tortured flesh and endless desire. The black, sleety wind carried him away like a drowned child, his eyes immense and wondering, so that for an instant I glimpsed the innocent he had once been…I never saw him again. Not in the way you could understand, anyway.

There was no dawn that morning, but at seven o’clock Mose emerged bleary-eyed from someone else’s bed demanding to see me. He came into the room without knocking, his hair over his eyes and his mouth wry. He looked tired and irritable, and I guessed that his head hurt, for he made straight for the brandy and poured himself a generous glass.

‘Why, Mose,’ I said lightly, ‘you look terrible. You really should look after yourself, my dear.’

Mose drained the glass and grimaced. ‘You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Fanny dearest?’ he retorted. ‘God knows what that bitch last night put into my drink, but I’ve got a blinding headache. And she had the cheek to charge me four guineas into the bargain!’

‘Last night you thought she was a charming girl,’ I reminded him gently.

‘Well, that was then. She didn’t look a day under forty this morning.’

‘Ingrate! Have some coffee.’ I smiled and poured. ‘All women are illusionists, you know.’

‘You’re all witches,’ he snapped, reaching for his cup. ‘You more than any of them, Fanny. So don’t start trying any of your charm on me this morning; I’m not in the mood.’ He drank for half a minute in sullen silence, then stood up abruptly, slamming his cup down on to the table so hard that I thought it might crack.

‘What is your game, anyway?’ he asked resentfully. ‘I’m tired of waiting, tired of staving off my creditors when I could be getting some money from all this. When are you going to stop playing games, you and Effie, and get down to business?’

‘Sit down, Mose,’ I said kindly.

‘I don’t want to,’ he snapped pettishly. ‘You must think I’m as half-witted as she is. What I want is an answer now. Otherwise, like it or not, I’ll do the whole thing on my own, and you and Effie won’t see a penny of Chester’s money. Understood?’

I sighed.

‘I see I’ll have to tell you,’ I said.

43

You have to understand that I was furious. I had nothing against either of them-not then, at least-I had waited as Fanny wanted me to wait, without asking any questions. But time was passing and I had had another call from one of my main creditors. As for Effie, I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. I only saw her when she came to Crook Street and she was pale and listless, with the blank half-witted stare of the laudanum addict she was. Though I felt some contempt for her weakness, I sometimes also felt a pang of regret for the lovely, passionate creature she once was. She wrote to me a dozen times; her letters were desperate, violent and confused, her neat italic writing broken by paragraphs of jagged scrawlings I could hardly decipher. She dared not meet me. The day before I finally confronted Fanny I received a last message, shorter than the rest: a page torn from a schoolbook with no signature and no date. The writing was shapeless, like a child’s; my name headed the note in letters three inches tall:

Mose

God my love my love my love. It seems so long. Have I been ill? Can you remember? It seems I have slept, slept all my life away…and dreamed so many things. I dreamed I was dead, killed by Henry Chester and left in an attic full of clockwork toys. He says I’m mad…but his eyes are like tunnels. Sometimes I hear him at night, when everyone is asleep: I hear him talking. Mose? Do you love her too? Is that why you won’t meet me? Everyone loves her. Sometimes I think that I could die for love of her…my life for her, poor miserable life…but for you. You are my life. In the dim passageways of my sleeping memory you follow me-I hear your laughter. Your hand on my hair: I sleep for a hundred years. Dust settles on my eyelids. I grow old. She doesn’t care: she’ll wait for me. Will you? Sometimes I look into my face in the mirror and I wonder if she’s there waiting. Mose, stop me from sleeping.

When I was at Oxford I remember going to a party at some student’s rooms; a midnight, back-street affair with illicit brandy and a couple of horse-faced giggling girls from the far side of the town. I remember that someone suggested we try table-rapping and it was with a good deal of merriment that we set up a little coffee-table with chairs in a circle and the letters of the alphabet chalked around the outside. We dimmed the lights, the girls shrieking and the young men hooting with laughter as we settled down to the game. I knocked on the table as soon as the company fell silent, setting the whole cacophony off again.

At first the glass beneath our hands spun aimlessly on the table: cries of ‘Silence!’ interspersed the laughter and there were indignant cries to the supposed cheats in the party-all of us!

Then, seemingly of its own volition, the glass went flying across the table, spelling out ribald messages about members of the assembled gathering and causing a new outbreak of squealing from the drunken girls. I always had a fair hand at conjuring.

But then everything changed: my careful manoeuvre was aborted by some more skilled table-rapper. I sought to win back the glass, but it was wrenched from my hand and spun across the table with astounding accuracy. Irritated, I glanced at my partners across the table…and I swear, no-one was touching that glass. No-one.

Even then I knew that it was a trick: I didn’t believe in ghosts, nor do I to this day. But I never found out who the trickster was that night-I had thought my friends all too drunk, or too unimaginative, to carry off such sleight of hand-but the phrases which staggered across the coffee-table in that dark room fifteen years ago, the words which seared my brain in the minutes before my nerve broke and I kicked the table over…

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. But Effie’s slashed and fractured sentences and those desperate phrases against the table-top might have come from the same lost and broken heart: a voice from the dead.

Stop me from sleeping…

Fanny had her own reasons for keeping Effie away from me. God knows I didn’t care; I was heartily sick of their charade and wished I had never become involved. Instead, Fanny kept me supplied with drink and entertainment while I was at Crook Street and she and Effie held their interminable counsels upstairs. But that wasn’t the worst of it. No.

It was that name…Marta.

Her name was a sigh, a prayer, a supplication: on Fanny’s lips a kiss, on Henry’s a moan, on Effie’s a benediction of such potency that her entire being was suffused with love and longing…Marta.

After midnight she walked the dim passageways of the Crook Street house. I felt her light, ironical touch against the nape of my neck as she passed. I caught the scent of her against the curtains, heard her sweetly hoarse, slightly accented voice from the open window, laughing from the damp London fog. I dreamed of her as I had first seen her through the chink in the wall-a burning rose of crimson flesh, a Fury with her hair in flames, laughing through the fire like a madwoman or a goddess…

And yet there was no Marta.

Sometimes I had to remind myself of the fact for fear I might go mad like all the rest of them. There was no Marta-I knew that: I had seen her reduced to a swirl of red ochre in the bathroom sink, a smear of cosmetics on the white of a linen towel. Like Cinderella, she was built from midnight’s deceitful magic; dawn left nothing of her but a few dyed hairs on a pillow. And yet, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes…

Damn her! Damn all their poisonous games.

There was no Marta.

Then there was the business with Henry Chester. Oh, don’t think I was having second thoughts. I had no cause to love the man, nor he to love me, but it seemed to me that the whole affair was getting a trifle too eleborate for my taste. I admit I laughed at first at the thought of Effie’s seduction of her own husband-there was something infinitely perverse in the idea which appealed to me-but if you had seen Chester, with his fixed and deathly smile…He looked like a doomed man at Hell’s own border.

What did they want of me? Damned if I knew! Fanny must have known by then that even if we succeeded in wresting Effie away from Cromwell Square there would be no place for her with me. I wasn’t going to marry her and had never intended to. When she spoke of the future at all, Fanny always said: ‘When we’re together again,’ as if some family reunion was on the cards. I couldn’t see it. Effie live at Crook Street? The more I thought about it, the more absurd it seemed. The sooner I was out of the game, I decided, the better.

It wasn’t even as if I were seeing any money from it all: the grim masquerade seemed to lurch on indefinitely. Looking back, I suppose I could have broken free then-I would have lost my chance to blackmail Henry Chester, but that was not why I stayed. Call it arrogance if you like: I didn’t want to be bested by a woman. Either way, I fell into their trap neatly enough. I must have been mad.

I like to think I hesitated at first: the plan was so Gothic, so ludicrous, that it might well have been the libretto for some darkly burlesque operetta. Fanny sat on the sofa and preened herself as she told me, and I, in spite of my spiralling headache, found myself laughing.

‘Fanny, you’re priceless,’ I said. ‘I really did think for a moment that you were serious.’

‘Oh, but I am,’ she said serenely. ‘Very serious.’ She watched me from her cryptic agate eyes for a moment then gave me a secretive half-smile. ‘I’m counting on you, Mose, my dear. Really.’

I gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Are you telling me that Effie persuaded Henry to agree to her own murder?’ My laugh was the sick, nervous laughter of hysteria. I cleared my throat, poured myself another glass of brandy and swallowed half of it at once.

The silence rang between us.

‘Don’t you believe it?’ said Fanny at last.

‘I…I don’t believe Effie…’

‘But it wasn’t Effie.’

Damn her! Her voice was smooth as cream and I knew what she was going to say.

‘Damn it, Fanny, there is no Marta!’ I heard my voice crack, high above its normal range, and fought to bring it back under control. ‘There is no Marta. There’s only Effie, who is three parts crazy…and what does she expect to gain from all this? What does she want?’

She smiled indulgently. ‘You should know that.’ A moment to allow her words to sink in. ‘She and I are both counting on you.’ Her smile became impish.

‘And Marta, of course.’

44

I could not go home to Cromwell Square. The thought of entering the house where she slept, passing her door, maybe brushing against her in the passageway or feeling her mad, accusing stare in the small of my back; watching her drink her chocolate at breakfast or unfold her needlework in the morning-room…and all the while knowing that at midnight she would be dead in some anonymous grave in Highgate, perhaps the very same which sheltered the whore’s child’s unquiet half-sleep…I could not bear it.

Instead, I made my way in the dark to my studio and tried to sleep. But the wind screamed outside in Effie’s voice, rattling the windows. Twenty grains of chloral was all I dared take. Even they brought no comfort, simply a lethargy of the spirit which quickly shifted to a shivering restlessness. I had a bottle of brandy in one of my cupboards: I tried to drink it but found that my throat had constricted to pinhole-size. Choking, I spat out the burning liquid in a wide arc around me. Suddenly I glimpsed a movement in the far corner of the studio; in the thickest shadow I thought I saw a shifting of drapery…the outline of a woman’s hand…

‘Who’s there?’

No answer but the wind. ‘I said, who’s there?’ I took a step forwards and she was standing in the furthest corner, her face a pale blur, hands outstretched to claim me. For an instant I sank into total delirium, an incoherent streamer of sound unfurling from my lips…then my groping hands met the frame and the smell of paint and varnish filled my nostrils.

‘Ahhh…’ I struggled to control my voice, dragging it back to its normal range. My mouth was slack; the captured moth beneath my left eyelid desperately fluttering.

‘Sch…Scheherazade.’

That was better. I said the name again, feeling my mouth take shape again beneath the difficult syllables. I forced myself to touch the painting and my laughter was forced and cracked, but at least it was laughter. There was nothing, nothing to be afraid of, I told myself fiercely. There was no dancing Columbine with empty eye-sockets and carnivorous teeth; no little ghostchild with arms outstretched and chocolate on her fingers; no Prissy Mahoney with her keyhole of blood; no Mother watching from her deathbed with her lovely ravaged face…

Enough! I forced myself to turn away from the painting (absurd that I should feel the hammering of Marta’s eyes like nails between my shoulder-blades, pitilessly bisecting the soft white cord of my spine) and walk towards the fire. I looked at my watch. Half past two. I found a book lying face down on a chair and glanced at it idly to pass the time. To my disgust I saw that it was a book of poetry; opening it at random I read:

my sister’s sleep

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:

At length the long-ungranted shade

Of weary eyelids overweigh’d

The pain nought else might yet relieve.

A childish hand had underscored certain parts of the verse in red pencil and, with a shiver, I realized whose book this was; on the title page the legend euphemia madeleine shelbeck, written in a round, neat hand, made me hurl the book as far away from me as possible into the shadows. Damn her! Was she never to leave me in peace?

The wind’s voice had reached an unearthly pitch in the chimneys and the rafters; the building was an eyrie of fluttering, shrieking, invisible creatures. I was inside Pandora’s box, a shadow-thing awaiting my release. How could I be afraid of the dark? I was the dark, the essence of the night’s monsters. Ludicrous to think that the monster might be afraid; pathetic to imagine him cowering in the dying firelight on this, the night of his release. I was almost beginning to enjoy the thought when the studio door slammed open and terror sliced at me once more.

For an instant I actually saw them, my memory’s demons with my mother at their head like a black angel, then an icy gust of wind razored past my head and the door slammed shut. It was then that I saw the cat, Effie’s cat, standing quietly next to the door in a drift of dead leaves blown in by the wind. At first I thought that the leaves were the cat, then I saw its flat, agate eyes gleaming from the doorway, one paw raised with delicate precision, like a beautiful woman’s greeting. As I watched it yawned like a snake and began to lick the outstretched paw with languid grace. For a moment I was frozen by certainty: it was her; the ghostchild, watching me through the cat’s eyes, the ghost of my first murder come to taunt me as I sat here contemplating my second. Could I hear the words?

(whataboutmy what about my what about my story?)

‘Go away!’ I spoke aloud.

(will she scream henry? will she wake and see you? will she smell of lavender and chocolate oh will she henry?)

‘I’m imagining this.’

(are you)

‘There’s no cat here.’

(henry)

‘There’s no cat here!’

My voice cracked and flew off into the dark like a volley of shots and, as the silence settled around me again, I realized that I was right: what I had taken for a tabby cat standing by the door was really only a curl of brown leaves shifting uneasily in the draught. Oddly, the knowledge did not cheer me but drove a deeper chill into my heart. I turned away, sickened and trembling. I wondered what Marta was doing.

The thought of her, the strong, sweet certainty of her, cleared my head a little. I imagined her in my arms, and the knowledge that she would soon be mine made my heart thrill with courage. With Marta to help me I could do it, do it without remorse: there would be no black angel at my door, no autumn-cat curled in the shadows…no pale little ghostchild. Not this time. This time, Marta would be mine and we would walk a thousand and one nights together.

I took five more grains of chloral and was gratified to feel them taking effect almost immediately: the top of my head had become a clear, cold drum of resonances, delightfully floating above my body like a child’s balloon. My thoughts, too, were balloon-like, enclosed and remote, moving with a dreamlike slowness in the dark.

Twenty-five to three. Time spiralled out indefinitely ahead of me…so much time. The seconds were silent breakers rolling across a bleak, grey shore, counting out infinity. I stumbled towards my easel and began to paint.

I suppose you’ve seen her: some call her my greatest work, though her story is perhaps too close to the dark core of her creator for her to be appealing. I cannot imagine her sharing a gallery with Rossetti’s jaded courtesans or Millais’s spoiled, sugary children. My Triumph of Death is a gateway into my particular hell, an incarnation of every black thought, cold fear, stifled sweetness…she is bone-white and lethal, hair blown up and around her face the points of a dark star, her eyes blind as fists. She stands with her legs apart and her arms raised towards the pitiless unblinking Eye of God in the curdled clouds above her, naked and terrifying in her nakedness, for though nothing human remains in her stark beauty, nothing tender in the pure, violent curve of her lips, she can still arouse desire: the frozen, desperate lust of the grave. In a sense she is more beautiful than she has ever been; red and white as the bloody Host, she stands astride a shattered landscape of human bones, a red, apocalyptic sky at her back.

Though she has Marta’s face she is not Marta, not Effie, not my mother or Prissy Mahoney or the dancing Columbine. Or, if you wish, she is all of them and more. She is your mother, your sister, your sweetheart…the dim, shameful dream you dreamed when the world was young. She is I…she is you…on her head a crown of thorns, at her feet a cat of dead leaves yawning balefully; and across the sensuousness of her snakelike, childlike body, the double triangle formed between her mouth, her breasts and the dim nebula of her pubic hair, the four occult hieroglyphs of the Tetragrammaton: yod-he-vau-he. The secret name of God.

I Am That I Am.

45

The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I became. Mose, I said to myself, you must be mad. But there was too much at stake for me to be coy about a harmless deception: the plan was simple, childishly so indeed, without the slightest risk of mishap. All I had to do was to help Henry carry Effie to the cemetery, choose a vault in which to hide the body, put her into it, seal the vault, then return to the grave when Henry was out of the way, release Effie and drive her to Crook Street. There, whatever the both of them thought, my responsibility would end and I could at last begin to collect the profits. Simple.

Henry would assume that Effie was dead, either by the overdose he had given her or by the cold in the vault-it had snowed all day-Fanny would be satisfied and I would see some money. Effie, I hear you saying? Well, I never promised her a miracle and she had a good friend in Fanny; Fanny would look after her. I might even drop in to see her once in a while, as long as there was no talk of Marta. That was one bitch I never wanted to hear about again.

So I arrived at Cromwell Square at about half past midnight. The snow had drifted, making coach travel impossible, and I had to walk from Highgate High Street to the house with snow in my boots, in my hair and caked to the back of my coat by the wind. It was going to be a perfect Christmas Eve.

A dozen snowmen watched the High Street like ghostly sentinels-one even sported a policeman’s helmet set rakishly atop its bald head-and, though the hour was late, I could hear laughter and singing from lighted windows here and there. Coloured lanterns and bright garlands hung at the doors, tinsel and candles in the windows; sharp smells of cinnamon, cloves and pine needles floated out as I passed an open doorway; light fanned across the snow as a few late and drowsy guests drifted aimlessly out of the party into the night. I smiled. On a night like this-especially tonight-anything we did would pass unnoticed.

I hammered on the door for maybe five minutes before Henry answered. When he did eventually open-I had been looking forwards to seeing his expression when he realized who Marta’s ‘friend’ was to be-I thought he was about to slam the door shut in my face; then realization dawned and mutely he signalled me to enter. I stamped the snow from my boots, shook myself and went in. The house looked drab, almost neglected; there was no holly, no mistletoe, not a single strand of angel’s hair. There was to be no Christmas in 10 Cromwell Square. Henry looked terrible: in his immaculate black suit and starched shirt, shaved close enough to remove the top layer of his skin, he looked like a corpse fresh from the mortician’s. His eyes were huge and blank, his white face slack, and under his left eye a muscle fluttered and tugged, the only living thing in his derelict face.

‘You’re the friend of Marta’s?’ His first words were spoken in a hoarse undertone. ‘Why didn’t she tell me? Did she think I wouldn’t dare…? Didn’t she…?’ I caught a flash of rage and comprehension from his dilated pupils, and he grabbed me abruptly by the lapels, shaking with sudden fury. I could see the pores of his skin magnified through the beads of sweat on his lip.

‘Damn you!’ he hissed. ‘I always knew you couldn’t be trusted. You were the one, weren’t you? You told Effie about Crook Street. You made this happen. Didn’t you?’ His voice cracked and the tick beneath his eye intensified, pulling his features into a gargoyle’s rictus.

I shook my collar free of his grasp. ‘Dear boy, I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ I told him mildly. ‘I came because Marta asked me to come. She trusts me. If you don’t, you can deal with the matter on your own.’

Henry glared at me, breathing heavily. ‘Damn you,’ he said. ‘Why did it have to be you? If you breathe as much as a word about any of this…’

‘Oh, I’m likely to, aren’t I?’ I said with sarcasm. ‘There’s plenty at stake for me too, you know. I’ll see that it comes off all right-besides, we can give each other alibis. Nothing strange about a successful painter spending an evening with his patron, is there? That makes us both safe.’ I ran my hands through my wet hair and manufactured a hurt expression. ‘Henry,’ I added, ‘I thought we were friends?’

The glare went from his eyes and he nodded slowly. ‘I’m a little…overwrought,’ he said gruffly. ‘Of course, I should never have thought that of you. A friend of Marta’s…’ He shook my hand awkwardly. ‘You took me by surprise, that’s all,’ he explained, finding his stride again, ‘Come into the parlour.’

I followed him warily, keeping up the hurt look beneath my smile.

‘Brandy?’ he asked, pouring himself a generous glassful.

‘Keeps out the cold,’ I said cheerily, tipping my glass to him.

We drank in silence for a time.

‘So,’ I said at last, ‘where are the servants?’

‘I sent Tabby to see her sister in Clapham. Christmas visit, you know. Effie’s maid is in bed with a toothache.’

‘Very lucky,’ I remarked. ‘Almost providential, you might say.’

Henry shuddered. ‘I am aware of what you must think,’ he said rather stiffly. ‘The situation…is desperate in the extreme.’ He swallowed convulsively. ‘As well as quite…repugnant to me.’

‘Of course,’ I said silkily.

His glance towards me was sharp and nervous, like a bird’s. ‘I…’ He hesitated, no doubt aware, as I was, of the farcical aspect of the situation. These civilized drawing-room manners!

‘Believe me, I do understand,’ I said, knowing that if I did not speak he might remain frozen with his glass in one hand and the meaningless, apologetic smile on his face for the rest of the evening. ‘I have been aware of the…problems you have had from poor Mrs Chester.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded emphatically. ‘She was ill, poor thing, terribly ill. Dr Russell-author of several books on disorders of the mind-examined her, you know. She is quite mad. Incurable. I would have had to send her away to an institution, poor Effie; and think of the scandal!’

‘Any breath of scandal would ruin your career at this stage,’ I agreed earnestly, ‘especially now that your Scheherazade has met with such critical acclaim. I hear Ruskin is thinking about an article on her.’

‘Really?’ But his attention was only momentarily diverted. ‘So you see…’ he continued, ‘why the kindest course of action…the quickest and…’ The tic resurfaced for an instant and I saw him pull out his chloral bottle and shake half a dozen grains into the palm of his hand in an easy, practised gesture. He caught my glance and swallowed the grains almost furtively, with a mouthful of brandy.

‘Chloral,’ he said in a low, apologetic tone. ‘My friend, Dr Russell, recommended it. For my nerves, you know. It’s tasteless…odourless.’ He hesitated. ‘She wouldn’t…suffer,’ he said painfully. ‘It was so…easy. She just went to sleep.’ A long pause, then he repeated the words, wonderingly, as if mesmerized by their resonance. ‘She went to sleep. On Christmas Eve. Do you know that poem? I did a painting of that…’ He drifted blankly for seconds, mouth open, almost serene but for the merciless tugging of the muscle beneath his eye.

‘There is no better time,’ I said briskly, looking at my watch. ‘It is Christmas Eve; no-one will question our being out late at night. If we’re seen carrying a body, people will assume it is some friend of ours who couldn’t take his drink and it’s cold enough for us to wear mufflers and hats and cloaks without attracting attention. Best of all, it’s going to snow all night and so our footprints in the cemetery will be completely hidden. There is no better time, Henry.’

A beat of silence. I saw him nod, accepting the truth of what I had said. ‘Right,’ I said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Where’s Effie?’

He flinched, as if jerked by invisible strings. ‘In…her room.’ I was amused to read more embarrassment than guilt in his face. ‘Asleep. I-I put it in her chocolate.’

‘Good.’ I kept my voice neutral. ‘And what will you tell the servants in the morning, when they realize she’s missing?’

Henry smiled, his mouth thin. ‘I’ll tell Tabby that Effie has gone to see her mother for Christmas Eve. I’ll say I want to surprise her and I’ll tell Tabby to make the house beautiful for Christmas. We’ll want everything: holly, mistletoe, tinsel, the biggest tree she can find…Keep her busy. As for myself, I’ll go to London and buy Effie her Christmas present as if nothing had happened.’ His smile was almost serene. ‘Something nice. I’ll put it under the tree and I’ll ask Tabby to cook a special meal for us both-something Effie really likes-’ He broke off, frowning as if a sudden memory had disturbed his train of thought. ‘Chocolate. She likes chocolate…’ He paused again, his eyelid pulled by invisible wires, then with an effort continued: ‘Chocolate cake, or something,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll wait. After a while, I’ll begin to get restless and I’ll send a messenger to her mother’s house to find out whether she has been delayed. The messenger will return to say she never arrived there. Then I’ll call for the police and report her missing.’

For a moment, as I met his unflinching, triumphant gaze, I felt something almost like admiration. I wondered whether I would have been so cool in a similar circumstance. Not that I haven’t done the dirty deed a few times in my life, but I never poisoned a woman in cold blood-which isn’t to say that I never wanted to! As I looked at Henry Chester with his white face and that frozen, pitiless look in his eyes I wondered whether I hadn’t misjudged the man. For the first time he seemed truly alive, a man in control of his fate. A man who looked his guilt in the eye with a thin bitter smile and said: ‘Right. Let’s go. I am what I am.’