Spider Light(53)
Presently she heard the clanking plumbing in Quire’s bathroom one floor down. Pressing her ear against her door she heard the bathroom door open and close, and footsteps going down the stairs. A few moments later she heard the big main door opening. Was it Thomasina going out? Maud darted to the window. She had to be careful, she would not put it past Thomasina to watch the window from below. Sneaky. Sly.
No, it was all right. There Thomasina went, striding out as she normally did, wearing her woollen cloak with the hood. It was not especially odd for her to be out in the hour before lunch but it was unusual. She had quite an orderly pattern to her days and this time of the morning was generally devoted to correspondence. Dull stuff Maud had always thought it, but Thomasina had been strict about it, and said these things had to be done.
Against the grey morning she looked very formidable indeed. It was like a pen and ink sketch. If Maud had been going to stay in her prison she might have wanted to sketch it and use the Indian inks which Thomasina had bought for her.
But there was no time for that. The door of her prison was unlocked, she must take advantage of Thomasina’s being out of the house. Mrs Minching would be in the kitchen preparing lunch, and the two young maids would be with her.
Her heart thudding with excitement, Maud wrapped herself in her own woollen cloak–the very cloak she had worn that other night when Thomasina had found her hiding at Charity Cottage–and pulled on a pair of stout walking shoes.
She opened the door very carefully, and began to creep down the stairs.
After Thomasina had emerged rather shakily from the bathroom, she made the decision to put this nonsense to rest once and for all. She would go out to Twygrist this very morning, and go down to the kiln room and make sure Simon was dead.
The prospect of definite action steadied her, and her insides were immediately calmer. Once outside in the good bracing fresh air, she felt even better. She walked at a smart pace across the park–Charity Cottage’s little garden was looking very nice. Someone–most likely Cormac Sullivan’s daughter–had planted a lavender bush near the door.
She went on down the lanes. Twygrist, when she reached it, looked exactly as it always did. Of course it does, thought Thomasina. What did you expect? She glanced about her to make sure no one was around, and then unlocked the door and stepped inside.
It was an eerie repetition of her visit of three days ago. She lit a candle again, and went across the wooden floor to the lower waterwheel and through the narrow door behind it. The creakings and rustlings went with her–Thomasina shut them out because she was no longer worried by Twygrist’s macabre echoes; she was concentrating on what might be ahead.
She would not have been surprised to find the steel doors open–by now she would not have been surprised at anything–but the doors were as tightly closed as she had left them. She pressed her ear to the surface, trying to listen for any sound from within, but there was nothing. Or was there? Wasn’t that a faint tapping from the other side?
Thomasina stood back, trying to summon the resolve to open the doors. Logic dictated that Simon was dead–that he had been dead when she dragged him in here. Supposing he was not? But it had been three days now and he had been in there without food–more importantly, without water. Surely he could not have survived? She would open the doors and satisfy herself that there was nothing to worry about. Then she would go home and leave somebody else to discover Simon’s body.
She set her candle down on the ground and remembered about finding a wedge to hold the door open. It would be the worst of all ironies if she got herself shut in. She wondered if she should have some kind of weapon to hand, but she dismissed this notion as ridiculous and grasping the handle of the left-hand door, began to drag it open. It moved more easily than it had that first time, but the screeching of the old hinges filled the tunnels exactly as it had done before. As the door swung slowly back there was a faint gusting of dry stale air in her face, and then the room was open.
Thomasina pushed the wedge into place, reached for the candle and held the flickering light up. For a moment she thought the room was empty, and she wondered wildly if the events of three days ago had been a grotesque dream or even a delusion. Perhaps Simon had secretly fed her opium as well as Maud.
And then she saw the room was not empty after all. Near the brick chimney, where once Twygrist’s fires had burned to dry the grain overhead, was a huddled shape. In the dimness it looked like a bundle of rags. Now she was a little nearer, and now the candle was burning up a little more strongly in the dry air, she could see the tumble of hair and an arm protruding from the bundle, the hand turned palm upwards in a terrible gesture of entreaty, the nails broken and crusted with blood.
Thomasina’s knees suddenly felt as if they could not support her, and for a truly appalling moment there was the watery quiver in her bowels she had experienced earlier that morning. She took several deep breaths and after a moment was able to take several steps towards the prone shape. Simon’s distinctive hair had fallen forward over his brow–he had always worn his hair slightly longer than most men–and Thomasina had to repress a ridiculous urge to bend down and smooth it back, and whisper how sorry she was that it had come to this. Because after all, Simon had been the closest thing she had to a brother–all those holidays at Quire, all those shared memories.
This is the mill that Joe built
This is the man who blackmailed and drank