“Good evening, Mrs. King.” Somber tone.
“Good evening, Mr. Shepherd,” said Mrs. King. And then, when Mr. Shepherd didn’t move aside, “He sent for me.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why. He needs his rest. What’s this about, Mrs. King?”
Mrs. King felt her patience waning. She didn’t have the energy to coax and manage Mr. Shepherd anymore. “It’s my birthday,” she said, reaching around Mr. Shepherd, opening the door. “I daresay he wants to give me my present.”
The room had changed the moment he’d returned from the Continent. A decline that was never to be reversed. The windows were shuttered, the tables covered with all the paraphernalia of a sickroom: pillboxes and towels and bowls ready for the nurse to collect. There was a sulfurous smell in the air. She wondered if the master had brought it with him from the gaming tables and watering holes of the spa towns.
She made herself look at the bed.
Mr. de Vries was lying there, propped up with silk cushions, curtains pulled back. Even from a distance, she could hear his breathing, the grating sound of his lungs.
“Good evening, sir,” she said.
His eyes were closed, but he took a breath, a painful little sip of air. “Come here.”
Evidently, he wasn’t going to waste words. Mrs. King crossed the room. The carpets absorbed her footsteps; she moved completely without sound.
“Your present,” he said, resting his hand on a prayer book, there beside him on the bed.
His fingers were thin, very nearly elegant. But there was something gross about them, encrusted with rings, prominent knuckles, hairs sprouting at odd angles. Hands for touching, prodding, peeling back layers. Fingers that carried disease under the nails.
She didn’t touch the book. Someone would bring it down later. Pile it with the others, by her door.
“Thank you,” she said—because it seemed like a kindness, because it didn’t cause anyone any harm.
“I wrote a letter,” he said, hoarse. “If you want to know the truth.”
She felt her body grow very still. “What?”
“It’s in the house,” he said. “The letter.”
Later she tried to recall the moment, to pinpoint what she had felt. Surprise? Curiosity? It was a wriggle in her gut, certainly, but it was more like—unease. He was being economical with words, and so was she. It took care, and skill, and precision, not to say too much. And looking at him lying there, flat against the pillows, she felt something cold entering her heart. He’s on the edge, she realized. He’s dealing with the final things.
“What letter?” she asked, at length.
His eyes flickered at that. He still had it: the taste for a game, the nose for a tease.
“Find it,” he said, “and you’ll know, won’t you?”
She yearned to move toward him, and she wanted to creep away, all at the same time. As if blood spoke to blood, repelling and seeking in equal measure.
“Are you comfortable?” she said, at last.
She asked because she was curious. She wondered what it felt like to be there, right on the brink. Because surely this was the end? Surely they were very near it now? You only had to measure the shrinking line of his neck, see the way the weight had fallen away from his cheeks. His movements were growing slower and slower, the degradation unstoppable.
He let out a shallow breath. His eyes moved toward the blur of the medicine cabinet, the bowls, the pillboxes.
“I’m bored,” he whispered.
She loathed him in that moment, but she wanted to laugh, too. I would be bored, she thought. Oh, I would be so bored by it, dying.
Straightening, she said, “Tell me about this letter.”
“It’s about your poor mother,” he replied, barely a whisper.
Mrs. King felt her body turn quite still.
It was extraordinary, wasn’t it, how easily people could shock you? Even if she counted up all the years she’d been here, all the hours and minutes and seconds—and she could count them, she felt sometimes that she simply held them all in her mind, like little slots marked up with luggage labels—then she still couldn’t think of a time he’d mentioned Mother. In his house, in his world, this world that she had entered, Mother didn’t exist. Lockwood had impressed as much upon her, the first day she arrived.
She felt a frisson pass through her skin. “What on earth do you mean?” she said, voice low.
There was something building in her chest, something dangerously akin to fear. Because she knew how games worked. There had to be a delicious little bit of irony, a slice of pain. Someone had to lose for someone else to win.
Mrs. King knew she was a bastard, an indiscretion, a stain. She’d folded that away inside herself long ago. This had to be something different.
“This is yours,” he said. He lifted a finger, barely half an inch. “All this.”
To Mr. de Vries, an inch could cover oceans, prairies, great sweeping tracts of land. Silver. Gold. Mountains, studded with diamonds. So many possessions, held under his name, in his empire. She should have been confused. Dizzy with the scope of it, uncomprehending. But she felt only nausea, deep in her gut. She understood at once. Ha-ha, she thought, dully. A twist, a ruse, right at the end.
“You were married to Mother.”
He didn’t nod. He didn’t shake his head. He just stared at her.
Mother always said she was a widow. Mrs. King never gave it any credence. She’d imagined Mother as a nervy, scattered girl, already in the family way. She’d had a fancy man, Danny O’Flynn: slick curled, a fast talker, causing trouble in the neighborhood. “He gave all the girls a ring,” Mrs. Bone once said, dourly. “To appease the neighbors.”
Mrs. King had understood that. Appearances mattered enormously. They were everybody’s first line of defense. But once Dinah entered that house, she pieced things together: the oddness of her situation, the funds supplied to keep Mother in hospital. Mr. de Vries had fathered a bastard, same as a thousand men before, same as a thousand men would after. She had a stain upon her, and always would.
Hadn’t she?
The notion that Mother had been telling the truth, that she was a widow in law as well as in sentiment, was like being hooked in the stomach. The guilt—that Mrs. King had never considered it, hadn’t even thought to believe her—took her breath away.
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.
He didn’t answer that. He lay there, breathing, watching her with a peculiar light in his eyes.
“Find the letter,” he said. “And then tell anyone you like.”
That night, Mrs. King began the search for the letter. Start at the top of the house, she decided. The attics.
But the house was impossible. It bested her, every time she approached it. It was comprised entirely of compartments, of secret boxes, of tight containers. Jars, hatboxes, packing crates, vases, bookcases, writing desks, picture frames, looking glasses, false-backed cupboards, bedrooms, bedposts, bed frames…
She needed to make a more thorough inspection.
The plan came as her plans always did: in colors and shapes, not words. But this was bigger, grander, than anything she’d imagined before. It was cloudy, gauzy: she saw gilt and glass. Hot faces and men shrieking in confusion.