Henry did not go to bed after Violet left him in the garden. He stood in the cold until he was shivering, looking up at the dark face of the house.
The key to his mother’s rooms hung in his study, on the board behind the door, where it had hung for a dozen years. He took a lamp and went up through the sleeping house, past the long gallery, into the east corridor. He stood before his mother’s door and took a breath. He had not been inside since the month they buried her.
The key turned without resistance. The door swung open on its hinges, smooth and silent.
Henry frowned. A sense that something was deeply amiss crept over Henry, though he could not name the dread. Holding his lamp high, he paused upon the threshold for one breathless moment, then crossed into the room.
Holland covers lay over the furniture, grey in the lamplight, draped exactly as he remembered ordering them. Nothing wasout of place. He walked the room slowly, once round, the lamp throwing his shadow up the walls, and the dust lay thick on the mantelshelf and the bedposts, and a cobweb the size of his two hands spanned the corner above the window.
He came to the writing desk and set the lamp down and began taking off the covers. Dust rose and turned in the lamplight and settled on his sleeves. The webbing had glued the cover’s hem to the wood, and it tore softly when he lifted it. He opened the right-hand drawer.
He looked inside, searching his memory for something that might have been important. He opened the left-hand drawer, and the shallow centre drawer, and went through them. He tossed aside paper, a stick of sealing wax gone to powder, a dry inkwell, a child’s watercolour of a horse that was probably Harold’s. He found nothing of import and stood up.
He searched the room: under the bed, behind the headboard, the underside of every drawer, the shelves, the trunks, the pockets of her dresses, the boxes in the closet. Nothing.
He drew the bedclothes back into place, lifted the lamp, and went out, turning the key in the lock. Just as he traversed down the corridor, a chilling revelation struck him regarding the truth of his mother’s chamber.
The atmosphere had been lately stirred.
He returned to his bedchamber and went to the connecting door and knocked.
“Come in.”
Violet was sitting up against the pillows with a shawl over her nightgown and a candle burning at the bedside, and a book in her lap with its face-down. She did not look surprised to see him.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Fine.” He stayed by the door. He was aware, too aware of her hair loose over the shawl, of the warmth the room had that hisown did not. “I searched my mother’s room. It had been locked for over a decade. Or it should have been.”
Violet tilted her head. “Someone has been going in?”
“That seems to be the case. The dust is thick enough. But the air is wrong. A room sealed twelve years should smell of twelve years. This one does not.”
He watched her absorb the contradiction.
“Were you searching for anything in particular?” she asked.
“Her book. A cloth-bound volume, so thick,” he showed her with finger and thumb, “she was never without it. Everything she knew was in it. The simples and the dangerous kind. She kept it in the right-hand drawer of her writing desk. When we closed the room, I made a point that her things should stay where her hands had put them.” He looked at the candle rather than at her. “It is not there. And the dust on that desk is as deep as the dust on everything else. Whoever took it did so when my mother died.”
He heard her suck in a little breath. Her hand moved to her throat.
“There is no workroom in her chambers,” he said. “No equipment, no hidden space that I could find.”
“They must work in that room,” she said. “What other reason do they have for airing an empty room?” She leaned forward. “Let us look together in the daylight. Perhaps that will help.”
“Very well. And it has just occurred to me there were girls about Mother sometimes. I do not know if they were in the stillroom with her.”
“Who would know?”
“Mrs Greer, perhaps. I will speak with her at dawn before the maids are down.”
“Carefully,” Violet said. “Give her a reason that is not the reason.”
“I have a reason.” A corner of his mouth moved. “You have taken the stillroom in hand; a husband may decently ask who else in his house knows the work.”
“Look at us,” she said softly. “Conspirators.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, and the candle fluttered, and he was aware that it was deep in the night. He was standing in his wife’s bedchamber and there was nothing in the world he wanted less than to leave. Which was precisely why he made himself go.
