The Housekeepers(90)

“I’ll do you the courtesy of telling you to clear off,” the man said. “And I’ll only say it once.”

Alice had never seen her sister do it. She’d only heard about it. The neighbors said that Dinah could be violent. That she could make grown men weep. Alice had never been able to credit it. And yet now, as Mrs. King stepped quickly toward the debt collector, she understood. It was like watching a demon, a soft-footed sort of devil. Mrs. King sheathed her knife and came at him without a hint of fear. She drove into him, white gloves balled into fists.

“Ah—” said the man. He flailed, righting himself, reaching into his pocket. Alice saw the dull gleam of silver, the black eye facing her.

A pistol.

The park swayed, a gust of wind roaring through the trees. Mrs. King staggered.

Calmly, breathing fast, the man centered himself. His arm was steady.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

He lifted his pistol.

“I’ve got the money!” Alice’s voice was strangled. She drew out a fistful of banknotes from her apron, keeping her eyes only on the gun. “Here, here. See? You can count it. Take what I owe.”

Slowly, he came to her. He smelled ripe, as if he needed to bathe, but his overcoat still carried the faintest whiff of gardenias. “Show me.”

He kept the pistol on Mrs. King and Alice unfolded banknotes with shaking hands. He sniffed, held out his hand. Folded it all away in the lining of his coat.

“This was a bad business,” he said, staring her in the eye. “You’re lucky.”

He swiveled the pistol away. Tipped a finger to Mrs. King. “Good day to you.”

Alice didn’t watch him trudging away through the trees. She felt no relief. She closed her eyes. The plane trees were whispering, worrying, overhead.

She heard Mrs. King’s voice, tight, and from a distance. “Alice,” she said. “Are you safe?”

“Dinah,” she said. “I’ve been in trouble.”

At last, Miss de Vries got out of bed. It was a sound that did it. An echo of something, crystalline and pure, at the outermost edges of her consciousness.

A cry.

She ran a hand across the rippled surface of her sheets, instincts stirring.

When she rolled the bedroom doors back, the air around her felt as if it had been hollowed out, immeasurably expanded. The lights were burning, same as always, in the passage. But she saw the wrongness at once. The floor: glossy black paint, obsidian smooth. It made her dizzy. Someone had taken up her splendid carpets. They’d left only the bare, stained boards underneath.

She touched the floor with a toe. Cold.

Movement below. Footsteps, hundreds of them, unmistakable.

But no voices.

She stepped out into the passage.

38

3:00 a.m.

Winnie surveyed the courtyard. It was still filled with water, the abandoned rafts bobbing worriedly on the surface of the Nile. The garden was alive with activity, and she could hear a racket building in the mews: coaches and wheelbarrows and pony traps and boys with panniers over their shoulders. Cart after cart after cart was rattling away from Park Lane, out of sight of Hyde Park, taking the side streets and mews lanes and alleys of Mayfair. Enormous motors stood at the gates, spiriting the angels and triptychs and diptychs into the night. Winnie saw their agents observing proceedings from the gate. The whole underworld was out tonight.

She came back to the hall. The Janes appeared, limping.

“How much more time do you need?”

“Five minutes.”

Winnie tried to be calm. “Five more?” She had hoped they could be away by three. It had seemed very nearly impossible that they would keep the crowd in the park for even ninety minutes, even with their pyramid and their vans carefully blocking the junctions. “Give Alice the word. Let’s get Madam downstairs.”

“We haven’t seen Alice for hours.”

“Then find her. We need her to go and fetch—”

An out-of-breath, a voice above them: “Ah.”

Winnie turned, looked upward, and there stood Miss de Vries, motionless above them.

Miss de Vries had descended through her house the way she always did, passing the ballroom and the saloon, absorbing the great sweep of the grand escalier.

She looked down at the front hall. She didn’t gasp. Later she was glad she didn’t show that sign of weakness. But, really, it was because the air was sucked from her lungs. The silence, the vastness, the emptiness, took her breath away.

The light was too bright, the white marble too brilliant. The height of the hall seemed almost obscene, cathedral like, glistening. Ropes hanging from the roof. Sweat on the air.

She understood. Everything had been stolen from her.

It is extraordinary what the human brain can comprehend, what new realities it can absorb. It had always been unlikely, she thought, that she would be allowed to control this place, whether she loved it or not. This life had been fleeting, transitory. Only half-real, all along. She remembered how angry she had been, a few hours earlier, when that awful woman stole Papa’s old watch. A watch: a tiny thing. Nothing. She felt the urge to laugh: a hollow, dreadful sensation.

Then it burned away. She went all the way down the stairs, slowly.

Footsteps. A figure among many more, winking and glinting, beneath her.

Isis, painted, sequined, clambering on top of a box. A huge crate, at the foot of the grand escalier. “I told you,” the figure said to Miss de Vries, “that I would deliver you to your death.”