Pandora(88)

The whole time Sir William has been speaking, Dora has felt a clamping at her heart. Somehow, she knows what he means to say next.

‘My uncle …’ she begins.

His face closes.

‘Hezekiah Blake was nowhere to be found during the cave-in. He turned up only later, a bloody scratch on his face. He claimed he had been caught in the collapse, had got out another way. But the problem is there was only one way in and one way out, and Dora …’ Sir William looks grave. ‘I was there the whole time. Digging you free.’



There can be no question of staying. No earthly question at all.

She leaves Edward and Mr Ashmole in the carriage, refuses to wait for them as she pushes open the door to the shop.

The putrid smell of Hezekiah’s leg and something else – something ammoniac – hits her hard as she rushes over the threshold. She stops, notes the overturned shelf, the remains of crockery scattered on the floor like refuse on the Thames.

‘Uncle! Uncle!’

Dora wants to cry – she can feel the tears pent up behind her eyes – but her anger is surer than her grief. How could he do such a thing? If he was responsible for her parents’ deaths – and an attempt on her life too, it seems – then the pithos itself must be the cause. For it to be here in London, now, after all these years … But why? With a shout she rushes across the shop floor and scrambles over the shelf. The crockery scrapes loudly on the splintered floorboards. She hears material rip.

‘Dora!’

Edward’s voice, but she barely registers it. She reaches the basement doors and pulls on the handles, but they do not give way. Dora looks down to see the padlock shut and secure, the chain swaying from the force of her desperate tugging.

Upstairs, then.

She turns, makes her hasty retreat to the shop floor.

‘Dora,’ Edward tries again, holding out his hand, but she ignores him, sweeps past both him and Mr Ashmole who stand uselessly at the counter, watching her with ill-disguised pity. Through the connecting door she goes – the bell harshly loud on its spring – up the narrow stairs, her footsteps unforgiving on the treads.

When she pounds on the door to Hezekiah’s bedroom there is no answer. Angrily Dora pulls it open, finds the room as black as pitch.

‘Missum …’

Dora spins round. In the doorway of her old bedroom stands Lottie. The housekeeper wrings her hands together, and her unbruised eye looks red and puffy, as if she has been crying.

‘Where is he?’

Her voice is full – she can hear the dangerous note in it – and the housekeeper stares at Dora without making another sound.

‘Where is he?’

Lottie jumps, her face crumpling. ‘Gone!’ she finally cries, clenching her fists under her chin. ‘I don’t know where.’

The noise that escapes Dora is like nothing she has heard before. She reaches for the banister, heaves against it. Spots spasm in front of her vision. Then, decided, she pulls herself up, begins to climb the stairs.

‘Don’t go up there, missum.’

Something in Lottie’s voice. Dora stops, turns.

‘Why not?’

But Lottie just shakes her head, will not answer. Cannot, it seems, and something else begins to hammer in Dora’s chest, her skull. Dora turns again, runs full pelt up the stairs.

Her attic door is wide open, hanging at an angle. From the landing she can already see the mess of clothes in the middle of the floor, and the anger falls from her in one single breath. It is as if everything slows its pace, as if she walks underwater, unable to anchor herself to the ground but somehow, somehow, her feet take her into the room.

In dismay Dora looks at the detritus spread haphazardly over the floor, the open doors of the wardrobe and chest of drawers, the demolished mess of her desk. Beads and wire, all her jewellery supplies, thrown about as if they were nothing more than rubbish.

A cold breeze gently ruffles the curtain at the window and moonlight streams into the room, a beam of white pointing at the floor. She turns her head.

‘No. Oh, no. No no no …’

Like a puppet pulled along on a string Dora follows the trail of black-and-white feathers scattered across the floorboards. She raises her eyes. The door of the birdcage hangs precariously off its hinges, and Dora clamps her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.

At the bottom of the cage lies Hermes, her beautiful Hermes, his elegant neck snapped in two.





PART III.



When all of this – desire and joy and pain –

Has melted and dissolved in stormy rapture

And then refreshed itself in blissful sleep,

You will revive, revive to fullest youth,

To fear, to hope and to desire once more.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Prometheus (1773)





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX





From the east side of the river the journey to the Horse and Dolphin usually takes only an hour but Hezekiah’s leg is a hellish pain and despite the sharp frost in the February air he is sweating profusely through his cambric. Instead, the journey takes him nearly two.

The city, when the sky is dark, lives in different skin. Nose curled, Hezekiah passes down dank, filthy alleys and is surprised to find that even at this dawn hour, harsh laughter echoes from deep within them.