“Those were not my instructions.” She did not look pleased. “I’ve had no telegram, nothing. I will need to inform Cairndale.”
“Listen, Alice Quicke can handle twice whatever I can. She’s hard as nails, that one. And the Midwest is halfway to wilderness, Margaret. Give her time. I’d be more worried if you had heard from her.”
“Did you quarrel? Is that why she went alone?”
Coulton smiled in calm annoyance. “I’ve known shoe leather more agreeable than her. But that weren’t it.” His voice lowered. “I heard talk, Margaret. In Liverpool. Before I left.”
“Oh?”
“I think maybe our old friend’s back. I think he’s got an interest in our lad, here. In Charlie.”
“Our old friend.”
“Aye. Marber.”
“I know who you mean, Mr. Coulton. But he’s been gone seven years. Why return now?”
Coulton shrugged angrily, his stout face reddening. “Well, I never read his bloody diary, did I? Maybe he got lonely.”
All this Charlie, bareheaded, still standing, with trousers darkened from the rain, observed with careful attention. He was used to making himself still and unseen and he tried to do that now. But when Mrs. Harrogate let her gaze fall on him, it was as fierce and piercing as before, and he understood she hadn’t forgotten his presence at all.
“Mr. Ovid,” she called sharply. “There is a basin of heated water on a nightstand, and fresh towels laid out for you. I have taken the liberty of acquiring some more suitable clothes on your behalf. I thought you would be shorter of stature, but they will do. Yours is the first room off the landing on the second floor. You must be wearied from your journey. I will fetch something for your appetite shortly.”
Charlie, uncertain, turned and went up the stairs. In the gloom the stained glass windows on the landing were lit weakly from the streetlights outside and cast his hands and clothes in a weird green light. His was a large wallpapered room, thickly furnished, its curtains drawn. A crack of light from the lane seeped under their folds. The bed was wide, tightly dressed. A mahogany nightstand held a covered porcelain bowl, a towel folded beside it. The towel, when he held it, felt impossibly soft. It smelled of lilacs. Last of all Charlie lifted the cloth from the bowl and watched the steam roll up over his hands and wrists like a dream.
He knew Mrs. Harrogate had sent him away to continue her conversation in private and he lingered in his room after washing his neck and face and hands, not caring. It felt so good to be clean. After a while he opened his door and stood peering along the corridor. There were other rooms, doors standing open. He had a feeling there was more to Cairndale and to Mrs. Harrogate but he couldn’t imagine just what it was. It seemed to him he had stepped through into a strange world, a world of shadows and eerie deformations afloat in jars and secrets and soap and blessedly soft towels. The craziness of it staggered him.
He went out to the landing and leaned over the balustrade looking down and then up and then, for no reason he could explain, he continued upstairs to the next floor. Another hall, another door. Charlie pushed it open with tentative fingers.
What he saw made his blood run cold. In a slumped bed, identical to his own, lay a figure, gray, bald, his bedsheets twisted in sleep, his skin leeched of color. He made no sound as he slept. On the nightstand Charlie glimpsed a pipe, a candle, a dish with a small black gum smeared on it, like a thumbprint. The man’s wrists and ankles, he saw, had been tied to the bedposts with rope.
“This ain’t your room, lad,” said a voice.
Charlie jumped. It was Mr. Coulton, standing in the opened door, his face hidden in shadow. He looked bigger, bulkier. In silhouette his squat head and long whiskers gave him a shaggy, gorilla-like shape. The floorboards groaned as he came in.
“I won’t be tied up like that,” said Charlie warningly.
Coulton grunted. “You? Jesus, lad. Course not.”
“Who is he? What’d he do?”
“Was, you mean,” Coulton corrected. “Who was he. A friend and confidant to a man what wants you dead, lad, if I know him right. This here is Walter bloody Laster.”
Charlie hesitated. Anyone who’d would want him dead would be back in Natchez, angry about the overseer, and the deputy he’d slaughtered in that doorway, but he didn’t think that was Coulton’s meaning. He stared down at the skeletal figure tied there, bruised like a pugilist, his lips soft-looking and very red. The sharp fingers looked bony and strong.