Softly we opened door after door, the latches protesting after their long disuse and the dirt in the hinges scraping, but in each room we saw nothing but white shapes and the silent dance of dust. Any of these muffled chairs might have an occupant. Any of these swathed, lumpy tabletops might be concealing Lena, curled and silent, and breathing as shallow as she could with her heart thrilling, or might, I knew, shroud Daisy, more silent still and beyond our help.
We stepped back to the foot of the stairs and paused before beginning to climb. The carpet on the stairs had been left in place or at any rate the felt backing had and we rose up each step without a sound. I felt my lip start to tremble and sensed the candlestick threaten to slip in my sweaty hands. I let out a breath in the smallest whimper I could, terrified that if I held it in any longer, it would end in a sob.
‘Have you seen something?’ said Alec, so quietly it was as though his voice was inside my head.
‘No,’ I breathed back. ‘It’s my foot. I twisted it.’
I suddenly realized that it was my foot and, bending, I set the candlestick down and closed my hand around the worst of the pain. It was hard and hot, bulging up around the top of my shoe. I lifted my heel, but resting all my weight on my toe was worse. Alec crouched beside me and felt first my good ankle and then the other, squeezing a little too hard and making me gasp.
‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll go on on my own.’ He must have been able to see me shake my head. ‘Well, all right, but take my arm.’
Thus we went on, I leaning heavily on Alec’s free arm, clasping his wrist tight and biting down on the knuckle of my other hand to stop the tears. Dread, shame and pain wrestled one another inside me, until each seemed to withdraw to a different part of me and settle there, the pain clenching my jaw, the dread of what was to come pounding an ache like a fence-post into my head behind my eyes, and the shame of it all – Silas’s voice – lodged like sandbags in my guts.
At the top of the stairs a passageway stretched out in both directions. To our left the meagre light slowly ran out and the corridor sank into gentle gradual darkness like a mouth, like a throat, but to our right we could see the passage turning a corner. We could see the angle of the wall and the sharp shadow it cast reaching towards us; somewhere along that way was an unshuttered window. Without speaking we started to move towards the light, and as we turned the corner, the brilliancy of it shooting out around the door at the end seemed too much to be the mild sunshine we had left outside on the drive. The door seemed to seethe with the effort of holding it and when I reached out and turned the handle it was as though the light itself burst out.
Almost in the centre of the ballroom, small and dark against the soaring windows and mirrors all around, Daisy sat primly on a wooden chair looking at her feet. I blinked and shook my head, and then I saw that her feet were taped up in what looked like a bandage and bound to one of the chair legs, together and to the side, crossed at the ankle just as we had been taught to sit at school, but her hands were behind her back instead of in her lap and the upright set of her shoulders came from the rope holding her hard to the chair-back, without which not only her head would be drooping.
I started towards her, with a howl of sour despair rising up inside me, but at my movement her head jerked up, her eyes rolling above the tape on her mouth, and her whole body began to surge, the chair creaking and rocking with each heave against the ropes. Alec got to her before me, worked her mouth free of the gag and knelt to tussle with the cord around her wrists as I took her head in my arms and held it.
‘She said no one would ever find me,’ Daisy said, working her face free of my grasp. ‘She told me no one would ever find me and Silas would never prove anything. But she must be mad. I kept telling her half a dozen people knew I was here and she couldn’t hope to get away with it, and that’s when she gagged me.’
Alec freed her wrists at last and hunched over her ankles.
‘Can you walk?’ he said. ‘Has she hurt you? Because as soon as these ropes are off you must run. I shall have to carry Dandy, so you must run along beside us.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll start now. I’ll be out before you. I’ll hop.’
Alec put out a hand and gripped my arm so tightly my fingers tingled.
‘Don’t go out of my sight,’ he said, still working at the bandage with his one free hand. I moved back to stand by Daisy.
‘Where is she?’ I asked, but before it was out of my mouth I heard footsteps, brisk, light, tapping towards us. A door in the panelling opened slowly outward and I caught a glimpse of a dark stone-lined corridor, a service corridor. Lena nudged the flap of the door wide with her hip, her eyes down, concentrating on the crowded tray of objects she carried.
We stood frozen while she negotiated the door, even Alec’s hands stopping their worrying to watch Lena edge into the ballroom and look up from the tray. Slowly, she took in the sight of us. Then she turned with a quickness that startled at least me and hurled the tray back through the gap in the closing door to scatter its contents on the stone floor of the passage.
I never knew what she had planned for Daisy, never saw what was on the tray, but the sounds it made when it fell stayed with me for years no matter how I tried to keep them out of my ears, and more especially my dreams. Metal rang on stone, glass shattered and heavy, dull objects thumped and rolled away. Lena smoothed down her apron – it was not until then that I noticed she wore an enveloping white apron – and walked towards us. She looked quite as tranquil as I had ever seen her. More so perhaps, I thought, as she drew near. Her face had a limpid serenity that I had never seen there before, and it was more grotesque than rolling eyes and drooling mouth would have been. I thought again of Alec and his pie and the headless Sergeant Pinner, imagining that Alec would have had just this smooth look on his face as he ate. It was the look of madness, when all the guy-ropes of the everyday have finally been shrugged off and the mind floats up and is gone.
Lena looked at each of us in turn, smiling gently, then rested her gaze on me and spoke.
‘Tell me then, my dear. Have you been watching me?’
I nodded, and Lena nodded along with me, still smiling.
‘I thought so. I thought so,’ she said. ‘And so it is all my own doing. I tried to use you, my dear Mrs Gilver. Perhaps if I hadn’t invited you to Kirkandrews to witness our tragedy…? Tell me, what did I do wrong?’
I gaped at her but then it dawned upon me that this was not meant to open a moral debate but merely to ask where she had betrayed herself to me, and when I tried to think of an answer I found I could not. Where had she gone wrong? Where had the suspicion come from, seeping invisibly like gas, until one was enveloped in the miasma, cut off from all the sight, sound and smell of the world but still unable to believe any of it was real?
Smiling, she waited for me to speak and as she did the smile changed, becoming as gaudy and jagged as a lizard’s fan.
‘You don’t even know, do you?’ she said, speaking now through clenched teeth, making thick white spots of saliva gather at the corners of her mouth. ‘Bumbling cow of a woman that you are. I chose the stupidest person in the room. So stupid. How I should hate to be you – Dandelion Gilver – bumping around in the fog like a sheep, too stupid to see how stupid you are…’
‘No need to run through the whole farmyard,’ said Alec’s voice, steady but strained. ‘And you’re wrong as it happens. It’s not stupidity, it’s goodness.’