The Death of Mrs. Westaway(103)

Like Joan of Arc, her mother had been. Like a maid going into battle.

Well, she had not inherited much from Maggie. Not her features, not her eyes or her hair, not even her sense of humor and skepticism. But perhaps she had inherited her mother’s courage.

Hal took a deep breath, steadying herself, trying to quiet the questions clamoring inside her—and then she opened the study door and stepped softly through the orangery to knock at the door of Mrs. Warren’s sitting room.

There was no answer at first, and Hal knocked a little harder, and as she did the door swung inwards, unlatched, and she saw that the gas fire in the little sitting room was on, and that the lamp on the table was burning.

Had Mrs. Warren fallen asleep in her chair?

It was pushed in front of the fire, close up, a blanket slung over the back of it making a dark shape that could have been a hunched old lady—but when Hal went cautiously forwards, her free hand outstretched in the flickering darkness, it only rocked away and then back, unmoored, and she saw that it was empty except for a couple of cushions.

“Mrs. Warren?” Hal called quietly. She tried not to let her voice shake, but there was something very eerie about the silence, broken only by the low rise and fall of a radio, and the creak, creak of the rocking chair upon the boards.

After the study, the sitting room was stiflingly overheated, and Hal wiped her brow, feeling sweat prickle across the back of her neck.

The sound of the radio was coming from behind a door at the back of the sitting room, and Hal took a cautious step towards it, but as she did so she nudged a little side table covered with pictures, and they fell, half a dozen of them.

“Shit!”

She grabbed for it, steadying the table before it could topple, but the pictures were like dominoes, clattering down in sequence, and Hal stood, frozen for a moment, her heart in her mouth, feeling its panicked thumping.

“Mrs. Warren?” she managed, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry, it’s only me, Hal.”

But no one came, and with trembling hands she began to right the pictures, one after the other.

As she did, she saw, with a growing sense of disquiet, what they were.

Ezra. All of them.

Ezra as a baby, in Mrs. Warren’s arms, his soft hand reaching out for her cheek.

Ezra as a toddler, running across the lawn.

Ezra as a young man, almost unbearably handsome, his smile flashing out, unguarded and full of wry mischief.

Ezra, Ezra, Ezra—a shrine, almost, to a lost little boy.

There was one of the three brothers together on the mantelpiece. None of Maggie, though that, perhaps, was not surprising. Not a single one of Maud. And none, save for that one picture with Ezra in her arms, of Mrs. Warren herself.

It was as if all the love in that twisted old heart, all the caring and gentleness, had settled on a single person, concentrated into a beam of adoration so ferocious that Hal felt that it could have burned the skin.

“Mrs. Warren,” she said again, a lump in her throat now, though whether it was pity or fear, she could not have said. “Mrs. Warren, wake up, please, I need to speak to you.”

But nothing. Silence.

Hal’s hands were shaking as she crept, inch by inch, across the firelit room, towards the door at the back, holding the yellow album out in front of her now, like a shield. She imagined pushing it open, the hunched figure standing behind in silence and darkness, just as she had that night outside the attic, waiting, watching.

“Mrs. Warren!” There was a note of pleading in her voice now, almost a sob. “Please. Wake up.”

She was at the door now. Nothing. No sound, no movement.

Her hand was on the panel.

And then she pushed, and the door swung open, showing a narrow bedroom with a single iron cot bedstead, a flowered flannel nightgown folded neatly at the foot.

Beneath the bed were two carpet slippers, side by side, and a coat was hanging on a peg next to the door.

Of Mrs. Warren herself, there was no sign at all.

Hal felt her heart steady in her chest, relief flooding her momentarily, but then another kind of uneasiness took hold.

If Mrs. Warren was not asleep or in her sitting room, where was she?

“Mrs. Warren!” she shouted, making herself jump with the shock of the noise above the quiet hiss of the gas. “Mrs. Warren, where are you?”

And then, at the back of the bedroom, Hal saw another door, and it was standing ajar.

“Mrs. Warren?”

She stepped into the bedroom, her sense of intrusion growing at the feeling that, with every step, she was venturing farther and farther into Mrs. Warren’s private sanctum. Part of her quaked at the thought of the woman’s fury if she discovered Hal here, but part of her was driven on by a kind of fascination—taking in the cross on the wall above the austere bedstead, the photograph of Ezra on the nightstand, and the small, pathetically small, flannel nightgown folded across the foot of the bed.

She wanted to turn back—but it was impossible now. It was more than a sick curiosity to know what was behind Mrs. Warren’s formidable fa?ade. It was a desire—no, a need for answers. Answers only Mrs. Warren could give.

Her hand was outstretched. She was almost at the door—

“Hal?”

The voice came from behind her, making her jump convulsively and swing around, eyes wide in the darkness.

“Wh-who’s there?”