Closing my eyes, I try to remember what Millicent spoke with her son about, what drove her to hurry off so quickly and come here, but everything’s a clutter. There are too many days, too many conversations.
A gramophone springs into life down the corridor, slashing at the quiet with random notes. There’s a crash, the music screeching to a halt, hushed voices bickering and blaming.
We were standing outside the ballroom, that’s where it started. Millicent was sad, wrapped in memory. We talked of the past; how she’d visited Blackheath as a child and brought her own children when they were old enough. She was disappointed in them, then angry with me. She caught me looking through the ballroom window at Evelyn and mistook my concern for lust.
‘It’s always the weak ones with you, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Always the...’
Something she saw caused her to lose her train of thought.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to recall what it was.
Who else was in there with Evelyn?
Half a second later, I’m sprinting into the corridor towards the gallery.
A single oil lamp’s burning on the wall, its sickly flame encouraging the shadows rather than diminishing them. Snatching it off the hook, I hold it up to the family oil paintings, inspecting them one by one.
Blackheath shrinks around me, shrivelling like a spider touched to the flame.
In a few hours, Millicent will see something in the ballroom that so startles her, she’ll leave her son standing on the path, and rush to this gallery. Wrapped in scarves and armed with her suspicions, she’ll spot Gold’s new paintings among the older ones. Any other time she might have walked past. Maybe she has during a hundred other loops, but not on this occasion. This time the past will hold her hand and squeeze.
Memory will murder her.
55
It’s 7:12 a.m. and the entrance hall is a mess. Smashed decanters litter the marble floor, portraits hang at odd angles, lipstick kisses planted on the mouths of long-dead men. Bow ties dangle from the chandelier like sleeping bats, and at the centre of it all stands Anna, barefoot in her white cotton nightgown, staring at her hands as though they’re a riddle she can’t make sense of.
She hasn’t noticed me and for a few seconds I watch her, trying to reconcile my Anna with the Plague Doctor’s stories of Annabelle Caulker. I wonder if Anna’s hearing Caulker’s voice right now, the way I heard Aiden Bishop’s that first morning. Something dry and distant, a part of her, yet apart at the same time, impossible to ignore.
To my shame, my faith in my friend wavers. After working so hard to convince the Plague Doctor of Anna’s innocence, now I’m the one looking at her askew, questioning whether any part of the monster who murdered my sister has survived, waiting to surface again.
Annabelle Caulker’s dead. Now, help her.
‘Anna,’ I say softly, suddenly wary of my own appearance. Gold spent most of his evening in a laudanum-fuelled fug, my only concession to hygiene being a splash of water on his face before I came charging out of the cottage. Goodness knows how I must appear to her, or smell.
She looks up at me, startled.
‘Do I know you?’ she asks.
‘You will,’ I say. ‘This might help.’
I toss her the chess piece I took from the cottage, which she catches in one hand. Opening her palm, she stares down at it, memory setting light to her face.
Without warning, she flings herself into my arms, wet tears seeping through my shirt.
‘Aiden,’ she says, her mouth against my chest. She smells of milky soap and bleach, her hair catching in my whiskers. ‘I remember you, I remember...’
I feel her stiffen, her arms falling loose.
Disentangling herself, she pushes me away, grabbing a piece of shattered glass from the floor to use as a weapon. It trembles in her hand.
‘You murdered me,’ she snarls, gripping the glass tight enough to draw blood.
‘Yes, I did,’ I say, the knowledge of what she did to my sister hanging on my lips.
Annabelle Caulker’s dead.
‘And I’m sorry about that,’ I continue, stuffing my hands into my pockets. ‘I promise it won’t happen again.’
For a second all she can do is blink at me.
‘I’m not the man you remember any more,’ I say. ‘It was a different life, a different set of choices. A lot of mistakes I’ve tried not to make again, and haven’t, because of you, I think.’
‘Don’t...’ she says, thrusting the glass shard at me when I take a step towards her. ‘I can’t... I remember things, I know things.’
‘There are rules,’ I say. ‘Evelyn Hardcastle is going to die and we’re going to save her together. I have a way we can both get out of here.’
‘We can’t both escape, it’s not allowed,’ she insists. ‘That’s one of the rules, isn’t it?’
‘Allowed or not, we’re going to do it,’ I say. ‘You have to trust me.’
‘I can’t,’ she says fiercely, wiping a stray tear from her cheek with her thumb. ‘You killed me. I remember it. I can still feel the shot. I was so excited to see you, Aiden. I thought we were finally leaving. You and me together.’
‘We are.’
‘You killed me!’
‘It wasn’t the first time,’ I say, my voice cracked by regret. ‘We’ve both hurt each other, Anna, and we’ve both paid for it. I’m never going to betray you again, I promise. You can trust me. You already have trusted me, you just can’t remember it.’
Raising my hands as if surrendering, I move slowly towards the staircase. Brushing away a broken pair of glasses and some confetti, I sit down on the red carpet. Every host is pressing down upon me, their memories of this room crowding the edges of my mind, their weight almost too much to bear. Clear as the morning it happened –
This is the morning it happened
– I recall Bell’s conversation with the butler at the door, and how afraid they both were. My hand throbs from the pain of Ravencourt’s cane as he struggled towards the library, shortly before Jim Rashton heaved a sack of stolen drugs out through the front door. I hear the light steps of Donald Davies on the marble, as he fled the house after his first meeting with the Plague Doctor, and the laughter of Edward Dance’s friends, even as he stood silent.
So many memories and secrets, so many burdens. Every life has such weight. I don’t know how anybody carries even one.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asks Anna, creeping closer, the glass shard held a little looser in her hand. ‘You don’t look well.’
‘I’ve got eight different people rattling around in here,’ I say, tapping my temple.
‘Eight?’
‘Eight versions of today as well,’ I say. ‘Every time I wake up, I’m in a different guest. This is my last one. Either I solve this today, or I start all over again tomorrow.’
‘That’s not... the rules won’t let you. We only get one day to solve the murder, and you can’t be anybody else. That’s... it’s not right.’
‘The rules don’t apply to me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I chose to come here,’ I say, rubbing my tired eyes. ‘I came here for you.’
‘You’re trying to rescue me?’ she says incredulously, the glass shard dangling by her side, forgotten.
‘Something like that.’
‘But you murdered me.’
‘I never said I was very good at it.’
Perhaps it’s my tone, or the way I’m slouching on the step, but Anna lets the glass shard drop to the floor, and sits beside me. I can feel the warmth of her, the solidity. She’s the only real thing in a world of echoes.
‘Are you still trying?’ she asks, peering up at me through big brown eyes, her skin pale and puffy, streaked with tears. ‘To rescue me, I mean.’
‘I’m trying to rescue us both, but I can’t do it without your help,’ I say. ‘You have to believe me, Anna, I’m not the man who hurt you.’
‘I want to...’ she falters, shaking her head. ‘How can I trust you?’
‘You just have to start,’ I say, shrugging. ‘We don’t have time for anything else.’
She nods, taking that in. ‘And what would you need me to do, if I could start to trust you?’
‘A lot of small favours and two big ones,’ I say.
‘What are the big ones?’