Spider Light(52)
Surely there could only be one reason for Maud being sick in the mornings: Maud had conceived. Quite soon Thomasina would explain her plan for a secret marriage and tragic widowhood. Maud would go along with it; she would understand what a scandal it would be if she did not. She might not actually want to allow Thomasina to adopt the child after its birth, but Thomasina could apply a little firm persuasion when the time came. It occurred to her that Maud was becoming so strange it might be necessary to remove the child from her care anyway.
But if Simon was still alive, the whole thing would start to go very wrong indeed. Supposing the nightmare turned out to be true and he was able to talk? ‘My cousin hit me over the head with an iron bar, and shut me in the kiln room and left me to die…’ Would anyone actually believe that?
But the nightmares and the worries were only nervous reaction. Even if Simon had not been quite dead, he could not survive for very long. Even if he had shouted for help until his throat burst, no one would have heard him, and no one could have got into Twygrist anyway, because Thomasina had the only set of keys.
On the morning of the third day after her attack on Simon, Thomasina, who prided herself on never being ill or feeling out of sorts, went down to breakfast feeling very unwell indeed.
The nightmares had persisted, and last night there had been the hoarse dark whispers she had heard inside Twygrist.
Did you really kill him, Thomasina? said these grating voices. Are you sure he was dead when you left him down there, are you, ARE YOU?
She had woken at 3 a.m. with the voices reverberating inside her head, and with fear clenching and unclenching so badly in her stomach she had to run to the bathroom. Back in bed she managed to get to sleep, but an hour later the process repeated itself. It was annoying to find that fear was something that grabbed you not romantically in the heart but sordidly in the gut. It was especially annoying because the use of Quire’s bathroom at such a silent hour of the early morning would be heard all over the house.
But it was important to behave as if nothing was out of kilter, and so Thomasina appeared in the morning room as usual. When Mrs Minching brought in kippers she forced herself to eat them and even asked for more toast.
After this she determinedly spent half an hour in Maud’s room, while Maud toyed pettishly with her own breakfast, consisting of coddled eggs and thin bread and butter–invalid food.
Questioned as to her day’s plans, Maud hunched her shoulders and said there was not very much you could plan for when you were locked away like this. Still, she might practise her music, she thought. Or she might read a little. And again there was that distant look, as if Maud’s mind was no longer quite with her body. It made Thomasina uneasy. Normally Simon had been with her when she came up here.
As if she had heard this last thought, Maud suddenly said, ‘Where’s Simon?’ and Thomasina felt a warning twist of discomfort in her stomach again.
But following her plan, even with Maud, she said, ‘I don’t know. He seems to have vanished–I’ve asked Reverend Skandry to make a few enquiries, but I should think we’ll find that he’s taken himself back to London without so much as a goodbye.
‘Oh, I see. I wondered where he was.’ The words were quite ordinary, but there was the furtive sliding away of the eyes again, as if Maud had grabbed Thomasina’s words and taken them into a secret corner to pore over them. Thomasina did not like this at all. She gathered Maud’s breakfast things onto the tray, and carried it to the door. Then she paused, and glanced back. Maud was still seated in the chair near the window, and she was watching Thomasina from the corners of her eyes. They had a dreadful sly glint; her lips were curved in a smile that seemed to bear no relation to the rest of her face. It was as if she was thinking: I know what you’ve been up to, Thomasina Forrester…I know all about you…
But Maud could not possibly know what had happened at Twygrist–she had been locked away up here. Even so, Thomasina was aware of the clenching pain she had felt in the small hours returning, like a hand dragging itself down in your bowels. Oh God, not again…
She murmured something to Maud about returning later, pushed the tray hastily onto a table, and got herself out of the room as quickly as she could, before half running down the stairs to the bathroom.
As soon as the colour drained from Thomasina’s face, leaving it pinched and sickly grey, the chance to escape suddenly presented itself to Maud. In her haste to get out–presumably to be unwell in decent privacy–Thomasina had forgotten to lock the door.
At first Maud did not believe it. She had not believed what Thomasina said about Simon leaving Quire, either, and she had sat down to play some of her beloved Paganini’s music: the eerie Caprice suites; the piece called Le Streghe which translated as The Witches. As she played, she laughed to herself over Thomasina’s discomfort. The laughter did not quite seem to belong to her, it seemed to bubble up of its own accord and become mixed up with the music. Maud found this a bit disconcerting, so she played louder and faster to drown the laughter out. When she stopped playing and laughing, she thought about the door.
It might be a trick. Let’s allow Maud to escape, Thomasina and Simon might have said. Let’s pretend one of us has gone away–we’ll pretend you’ve gone away, Simon, shall we?–and let’s leave her door unlocked, and hide on the stairs and watch her think she’s free. Then, just as she gets to the door, just as she thinks she’s going to walk free in the park, we’ll pounce. Yes, Maud could just imagine those two behaving so sneakily, but she was not going to be caught like that, not she! She was going to be too clever for Master Simon and Miss Thomasina!