“I didn’t know you had anything to take,” Zeb said. “You owe me five quid as it is.”
“She took my enthusiasm! My artistic essence! Women are the fuel for my creative fire, butshenever gave, just took and took and when she left me I had nothing. The spark, all gone. Just like our grandfather, sucking the life from his wives and children.”
“Who is? Her, or you?”
Hawley didn’t seem to realise that was a jibe. “Both.That’sthe Wyckham curse: we devour and devour, until we are devoured in our turn.” He was staring into the shadows, the cigarette smouldering between his fingers. “So whose turn has come now? The shadows are closing in, but for whom?”
“Stop it,” Zeb said. “Stop this nonsense about shadows. Stop drinking if you can’t hold it, stop whining about Elise as if that was ever going to end well, and if you feel doom coming upon you, book yourself into a sanatorium.”
Hawley didn’t react to that; he didn’t seem to have heard atall. He was staring off into the middle distance. It was too cold out here for Zeb’s comfort, and Hawley’s fug of perfumed cigarette stink was making him feel a little woozy. “Oh, forget it. I’m going in.”
He would have liked to go straight upstairs, but Jessamine hailed him as he walked through the hall, and he found himself coopted into a card game with her, Wynn, and Gideon. Elise and Bram sat on opposite sides of the room, not speaking to each other or the players. Their presence meant the atmosphere was constrained, which was to say as thick as mud. It didn’t improve when Hawley slouched in a few moments later, cold mist and perfumed smoke rolling off him, and went straight to the decanter.
Zeb played three rounds at Wynn’s insistence, foot tapping under the table, aware of his brother’s resentful gaze, and was relieved when the party broke up. He would have liked to head out of the room but Wynn said, “Sit with me a moment?”
Zeb reluctantly remained as the others left. Wynn said, “I wanted to speak to you privately. I have been considering your scruples and I believe I was wrong to press you.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.”
“It was not fair. I allowed my desire to see Jessamine established to overcome everything else. I hope you will allow me to offer a little explanation of my behaviour.”
He launched again into the story of Jessamine’s origins, in rather more detail, starting with his sister-aunt Laura and his father’s resentment of her. “He considered her a cuckoo in thenest. She was Walter’s legitimate daughter, but my father could not forget the fool Walter had made of himself and the disgrace to our family when he married the housemaid.”
“Rather harsh to blame Laura for that. What happened to her mother?” Zeb said. “You said she wasn’t competent.”
“A very foolish woman, always crying and making a fuss. Naturally, she could not leave Lackaday House: she was not fit to look after a child. My father found it all most trying. And then, you know, Laura was sent away and she could not come back until he died. Which he did in the mire, of course, crying out for rescue, but there was nobody there to help him, and so he was gone at last, and she came back to me.” He paused there, contemplating the portrait. Zeb twisted round to look at it, at the little smile on Laura’s face.
“But the Wyckham curse took her,” Wynn went on. “A handful of years and she was gone. At least I had my Georgina as comfort, until she was abused in my care and I lost her too. I cannot have history repeat itself with Jessamine. I need her to be secure.”
“Of course you do. But surely the way to do that is to help her make good choices, rather than rushing her into a bad marriage.”
“And what if she makes the error her mother and grandmother did? What if she trusts some villain with her affections?”
“Most of us fall in love with the wrong person at some point,” Zeb said. “Or the right person at the wrong time. Or the right person at the right time and then we make a mess of it. It’s her life, Wynn. You can’t rule it, and if you try, things are bound togo wrong.”
“But we see all around us the result of unruled, unruly lives. Look at Elise, at Hawley and Bram. At you.”
Zeb blinked. “What about me?”
“You have plenty of ability but no self-discipline. And so you are jobless, aimless, failing to—”
“My career and my life are my affair,” Zeb said over him. “You may not think much of either, but I don’t need you to think of them at all. And as it happens, my father was very much of the opinion that he and Bram should dictate my every action, so if you want to use me as an awful warning, which I must say I find offensive, it should be a warning against trying to mould people to your specifications, rather than helping them to do their best. It did me no good at all, and I doubt it will work for Jessamine either.”
Wynn was regarding him unblinkingly. Zeb said, “Well, that’s what I think. I’m going to bed now. Good night.”
He felt decidedly ruffled by that exchange as he headed upstairs. So ruffled, indeed, that he didn’t realise at first how dark it was.
The gaslight seemed to be turned down extremely low and it flickered as he walked. The shadows were dark around him in this blasted shadowy house, and the jumping light made them move in the corners of his eyes; he cursed Hawley and his unexpected, contagious fears.
There was nobody around. Well, that was only to be expected. The place was understaffed; the family were scattered aroundthe house; everyone else had gone to bed. There was no reason for him to meet anyone on his way up, and yet the house felt very dark and very lonely somehow, and the hairs were prickling on the back of his neck.
Stop it, he told himself.Imagination. He whistled a couple of notes and stopped because it sounded too thin, too frail.
He was being absurd. All he was doing was walking through the dark, empty corridors of a house built by a monster on the proceeds of obscene cruelty, and which its inhabitants believed to be haunted. There was no reason to be nervous at all. “Idiot,” he said aloud, forcing a grin.
He was at the turning for his corridor, and the lights were very low indeed. Gideon had been waiting somewhere round here when he’d arrived. He’d give money to have Gideon waiting here now. Whereas, if he turned the corner and saw a cowled grey shape…
His heart was beating faster than it should be. Ridiculous to be afraid of the dark, and of some fool dressing up. His father had had plenty to say about childish fears; Zeb had never been allowed a night -light in case it encouraged him. His father would be furious with all the superstitious nonsense sloshing about.
