At the back of the room stood a floor-to-ceiling industrial freezer, old-fashioned but powerful, cased in bare metal. A gust of vapour engulfed her as she pulled it open. Vacuum-sealed plastic packages, hundreds of them, were stacked on the shelves. She picked one up at random and turned it over. Whatever it was looked like a piece of pink meat. It was hard to tell what animal it might have come from when its original shape was so distorted by the sealing process. It was labelled with a cheerful-looking sticker featuring a design of hand-drawn flowers. Anna had seen the same labels on the produce of the Ashmore WI – mincemeat, jams, fruit preserves. She had even bought a bundle of them herself, against the far-off and unlikely day when she bottled the fruit from the espaliered quince in her garden. On the sticker was written in a spiky, old-fashioned hand: ‘7/9/00: (m) s: CG III: d: 13834’. The handwriting was identical to the handwriting on the pots in Stella’s room.
She replaced the package, picked another. The label on this one offered a date from the previous winter and the following cryptic description: ‘f: 1 day old. d: 9378, remvd gdn Pond Cott’. Anna stared at it, a horrible suspicion forming in her head. She turned the package over, to find herself confronted by a bulbous, rather deformed blue eye. It was Orlando and Vita’s sister: the poor, dead kitten she had buried, now shrinkwrapped, naked and skinned. Anna shrieked and ran out into the courtyard. She began running from cage to cage, undoing the doors and banging them open.
‘Get out!’ she cried. ‘Get out, get out!’ The cats stared at her. Some had leg muscles so withered they were unable to stand; they hunkered down and stared at her, paralysed, perhaps, by the idea of freedom. Other jumped down happily enough, only to mill puzzledly around the ankles, looking up for guidance. All the cages were numbered. When she found 13834, its occupant turned out to be a black cat with a huge, debased body and tiny, wedge-shaped head. It looked at her nervously. ‘Get out!’ she cried. Tears were pouring down her face. ‘Oh please get out!’ She reached in and lifted it down. Once it had the idea, it ran off quickly enough, heading for the hole in the wall. Anna stared wildly about. She was at the heart of Nonesuch. The cages reeked. The whole courtyard reeked. Everything she had found was a betrayal, and it made her numb with anger and misery. I should have left the poor things locked up, she thought, until I could get the RSPCA in here. Then she thought: But I’ll never be able to lock an animal up again.
She was trying to decide what to do next when a human cry rang out from somewhere in the house. It was cut off suddenly, and not repeated.
The cats shifted uncomfortably, ears flat to their skulls.
‘John!’ called Anna. ‘John!’
Silence, heavy and forbidding.
Full of dread and last night’s dreams, she rushed back into the Painted Room. She had to wade through cats. They milled about indecisively for a moment, then followed her. One moment the courtyard was full of them: the next they were gone like smoke.
Anna poked her head out into the Long Corridor. Nothing. She looked right and left; then, under the sardonic gaze of Clara de Montfort, moved deeper into the house. An open hallway, known for some reasons as the Courseway, led her to a servants’ staircase with steep, narrow risers and walls polished at shoulder-height by generations of maids. Up went Anna, and the rescue cats flowed after her, maintaining a cautious distance: when she looked back all she could see were eyes; flat, reflectant, neutral, in the brown-stained light of the old stairwell. Orlando and his friend were among them somewhere. She wasn’t sure how comfortable that made her.
Deep Nonesuch, where time hung in the air like a smell: sounds were muffled or curiously amplified here, swallowed by passageways, sucked out of the thick old leaded lights and into the open air. You couldn’t trust a sound in Nonesuch. It was hard to track down. The house was like a maze, as if it had deliberately replicated itself and overlaid room upon room, doubling and redoubling its passageways. Up on the top floor, all the bedrooms had names – the Rose Room, the Chinese Room, the De Montfort Chamber. They were all old. They were all empty. They all smelled of mildew and decay. At the door of Lady Germain’s Solar, Anna thought she heard a noise. She pushed the heavy door tentatively, and it swung open without a sound, as if to welcome her in. She stuck her head through the opening. The Solar did not live up to its name: inside it was dim and brooding, the coved and ribbed ceiling looming over monumental Jacobean furniture. Voluminous swathes of jacquard-framed diamond-paned windows which allowed through only the feeblest glimmers of winter light. The sound came again, muffled, indistinct, as if someone were trying to suppress it. Compelled now, she stepped inside. The room, however, revealed itself to be entirely uninhabited: it had been, she sensed, from the heavy, thick air, for years and years. Even so, she found herself seized by an unaccountable dread, to the extent that the hairs on the back of her neck began to lift, one by one, as if in warning. But warning of what? There was no question that the room was empty, but still she turned wildly around and around, assailed suddenly, irrationally, by thoughts of haunted houses, slamming doors, bulging walls; by fears that she might find herself immured, swallowed up by the house and its history, as had the maker of the muffled cry.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she told herself sternly. ‘It’s only an old house. Old houses make strange noises all the time.’
At last, she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and turned to leave.
She had just reached the doorjamb, her fingers closing on the rough, lacquered old wood, when she heard a moan: low, anguished, male. She froze where she stood, heart hammering, cold waves of reaction rippling through her stomach and spine. The sound had come from somewhere so close at hand that she felt it almost as a physical presence, and she was overwhelmed at once by the need to run away and save herself and the conviction that the source of the noise had been John.
The next door down the corridor was identified as Jonathan Herringe’s original Great Chamber. Its door – all dark oak in bossed squares – stood open two inches. Anna peered in with considerable reluctance.
Heavy felt curtains had been drawn against the day. The room stank of wax from the candles that burned in the old cressets and wall-sconces. Replaced again and again as they consumed themselves, they had made contorted, dripping sculptures. For all this effort, their light seemed undependable, and the bedroom furniture – ebony cabinets, a tallboy, a massive walnut chest inlaid with marquetry and ivory panels – seemed to emerge from a smoky brownish haze. In the middle of the room stood the monstrous four-poster bed imported from Esting House in Leicestershire by Anne Barnes early in the seventeenth century, its drapes of muslin and brocade swagged back to reveal two figures.
Some time in the night, Stella Herringe had cut off her hair. During this process, completed with the help of a Sabatier knife, she had also cut herself, in several places. There was still some hair on her head, and some on the floor around the bed. She was wearing a long old-fashioned nightdress, and the stiff linen folds of that were also full of hair. How she had found enough to tie her cousin’s wrists and ankles to the pillars of the bed was unclear: but there he lay, looking exhausted. Had she tried to cut his hair off first? If so, the knife had laid open his scalp in one or two places, and blood had run into the stubble along the line of his jaw. Had she cut his clothes off him before or after he was tied down? That was unclear, too, but there they were, in a heap at the side of the bed. She was kneeling astride him, with the nightdress hitched up.
She still had hold of the knife.
‘Don’t you remember?’ she was saying, in the dull, patient tones of a woman who has been arguing all night and still sees no hope of regaining what she knows she has lost – who suspects, indeed, that the point of the argument had already been lost when the argument began. She sighed and got up, walked stiffly across the room to relight a candle which had guttered out. She trailed her fingers across the walnut chest.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘You must remember this.’ She laughed. ‘A kiss is just a kiss,’ she sa
ng. ‘As time goes by.’
Something had happened to Stella. When she moved into the light, Anna could see that the lace at the throat of the nightdress was not lace at all, but the papery white folds of her skin, where it hung from her neck and chin. Pale blue veins marbled its surface. Her cheeks had sagged and withered, her bottom lip dragged away from her mouth at one side, her blue eyes stared out vague and watery. She sat on the end of the bed and began to pick at her yellowed feet. ‘Surely you remember how we used to meet after evensong, run at barley-break with the children, dance in the ring while old man Worsley and young Jack Corbett played pipe and tabor for us?’
She laughed like a girl.
‘Do you remember when I was Clara de Montfort and you were John Mountjoy? Oh John, surely you remember that!’
This brought no response from the bed.
‘At Knole?’ she said suddenly. ‘With that little bitch when she was Anne Clifford? I knew you two had only been reading Chaucer together!’ A laugh. ‘She hoped I would be jealous, but I’m not stupid, John, I was never stupid. I knew you’d be there in the formal garden. Midsummer’s Eve, to dance with me. Why don’t you dance with me any more? You never do.’ She brooded for some seconds on the unfairness of this. ‘I never wanted the bolts of silk, John, even if they were the colour of my eyes. I only wanted you to be looking at me. You knew that.’
Silence.
‘You used to know that.’ She looked at the knife in her hand. ‘You knew everything. All those ancient languages, John! It was you who taught me them. Why, it was you who started it all!’ She got up and hammered angrily on the walnut chest with the heel of her hand. ‘And, also, you know, I had you on this, the night the Great War finished. You brought me in here and fucked me until I could barely breathe, while your mousy wife snored in the room next door. Have you still got the mark where I bit you? I suppose not. And what did she call herself in those days. Was it Olivia, John? Was that what the little whore called herself?’
She sat down and took his head gently in her hands.
‘I want you to remember, John,’ she urged him. ‘Four hundred years together, dying and returning, dying and returning, always in love. Why can I remember when you can’t? Is that fair?’ She stroked his forehead, then touched it with the tip of the knife. ‘It must be so damned convenient to just die and forget. Because really, John, you’re a coward, aren’t you?’ She put the knife down and pulled his head towards her. His face disappeared into the loose skin of her throat. ‘Shush, shush, there. Such a coward! There aren’t many like us. We should take care of each other, you and me, but you run away every time. First you run to her, and then you run to death.’
She let his head drop.
‘Well this time,’ she said, ‘I’m going to keep you.’
The man on the bed cleared his throat. It made a thick, painful sound in the room. ‘I think you’re mad,’ he said. ‘Can I have a drink?’
‘No. Not if I’m mad.’
He swallowed. ‘I’m really thirsty,’ he said.
She shook her head.
He said: ‘If any of this is true— Well, how desperate you must be to hang on to it all. Desperate and frightened.’ He lifted his head to peer at her. ‘There’s something wrong with you, Stella, something I don’t understand. Whatever it is, though, I think you’re as mortal as me. We all have to die.’
‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Wrong.’
She looked down at him thoughtfully. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘you’re going to try some of my special elixir.’ She poked around vaguely among the clutter on the floor by the bed. There was a click as the lid came off a little pot. A faint but unmistakable smell in the smoky air. ‘Look,’ and Stella. She straddled him. ‘Here. No, don’t move your head like that!’ She bent and kissed his mouth, then straightened up again.
‘All right then,’ she said.
She picked up the kitchen knife and drew it lightly down his chest. After a moment, a line of blood appeared.
‘I’ll just rub some in,’ she said. ‘This stuff can really get under your skin. It’s the formula I make only for myself: my own secret recipe, but for you, my darling, I will make an exception. Once you’ve had it you won’t be able to get enough. I use it every day. What Mark and Oliver sell for Engelion is very diluted mix by comparison, yet sales are going through the roof!’
Anna, who had been watching all this with a kind of stupefied horror, felt something brush against her leg. She looked down.
‘Oh!’ she whispered. ‘But you mustn’t!’
‘Who’s that?’ called Stella Herringe. ‘Who’s there?’
A hundred cats pooled around Anna’s legs – cats large and small, young and old, fat and thin, sick and well, cats tawny and orange, tabby and black, cats patched and striped and spotted – they flooded into the Great Chamber, where they ebbed and flowed like a sea, jumping on and off the furniture as they pleased. They singed themselves in the candles. They sniffed and blinked in the waxy smoke. They coughed up hairballs. They had brought with them a rank and honest smell. Their eyes glittered. They no longer had the air of victims. Stella Herringe stared. She made feeble pushing motions, as if trying to shoo them back into their cages. They had the energy of long imprisonment and the consistency of smoke.
‘But my work,’ she said. ‘All my work.’
She looked from the cats to Anna.
‘You!’ she said. ‘You again! Who are you this time? Olivia Herley, Phyllida Howard, Lady Anne Clifford? No, this time you’re just some jumped-up little trader from the City. Well you can’t have him.’ She looked down at the knife in her hand. Anna, who had come further into the room, took a couple of steps back. Stella said, ‘You always have him.’ She seemed bewildered. ‘Do you see?’ she said. ‘We’re two halves of the same thing. We complete one another. What would you know about that? Look, Anna dear,’ she said, as if she was offering milk and sugar in some Drychester tea-room, ‘there’s a symmetry to this, and all you ever do is break it—’
Her rheumy old eyes brimmed with tears.
‘Can’t you just leave us alone?’
‘You don’t love him,’ said Anna, who was keeping her eye on the knife and trying very hard not to think about the implications of what Stella had just said. ‘You don’t love anyone. I found out your dirty secret: I found your victims, your vile little beauty parlour. You made a monster of yourself, and now you’re trying to make monsters of the rest of us.’
Stella looked around at the cats. ‘All that work,’ she whispered. ‘All those careful breeding-plans. Some of those lines went back unbroken four hundred years.’
She threw the knife away. She smiled into Anna’s face. ‘Who would ever want to look like this?’ she said reasonably, pinching at the loose skin of her jowls. ‘Would you? Wait until it starts happening to you, we’ll see what you have to say then! No woman should have to age: our youth, our beauty is the only power we have over the world. And now we don’t have to lose it! Who can deny us the right to keep it? Who can deny us?’
Anna pushed her aside. ‘There isn’t any “us” here,’ she said. ‘There’s only you. And look what you’ve done.’
Stella tottered backwards. The cats, seizing their chance, swept across the room and engulfed her. She clutched at them as if to save herself, then stumbled heavily into the big oak tallboy. Candles toppled and fell. There was a moment of calm. Anna stared at Stella, Stella stared at the cats: hot candlewax sizzled where it lay. Then, with a soft whoosh of displaced air, the draperies round the bed caught light and the whole room seemed to fill with fire.
‘Christ,’ said John Dawe.
Stella got up and put her hands over her face. She ran about aimlessly. She did a kind of jig at the foot of the bed. ‘John, look,’ she said. ‘I’m on fire.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t help.’
She dragged herself towards him, then caught sight of the discarded pot of Engelion cream and reached for that instead. The linen nightgown smoked off her back.
She got some of the cream on her fingers, and from there on to one cheek, where it sizzled like fat in a pan and gave off such an appalling stench that it overpowered the reek of burning cloth and wood. ‘Help!’ she called. She struggled towards the door, one arm outstretched in front of her. The cats, maddened with fear, falling over each other to escape the flames, knocked her down again and fled, pell-mell, from the room.
Anna, meanwhile, worked at John Dawe’s bonds. Fear made it hard for him to keep still. Her eyes streamed, the smoke was already in her lungs. She kept giving up in despair and holding his face in her hands to kiss him, then scrabbling furiously again at the knots in Stella’s hair. Who would have thought it would be so strong?
‘I’m sorry, John—’
‘The knife,’ he said. ‘Anna, the knife!’
Anna stared at him, struggling to make sense of the words. Knife, she thought dully.
‘Stella’s knife. It went on the floor.’
‘Oh, the knife!’ she said.
The smoke was so thick she couldn’t see. Eyes streaming, she dropped to her knees and swept her hands across the floorboards. Nothing. She crawled a little further away, made another pass with her hands. Something gripped her by the ankle, and she was pulled under the bed. She screamed. There was something under there, rolling about, hissing and panting to itself, clutching at Anna’s ankle, her thigh, her arm. Stella Herringe, face blackened, teeth white as a toothpaste advertisement. ‘I’ll outlive you, Anna,’ she said. Then her agony rolled her off somewhere else. Anna dragged herself out into the smoke again.