Bitterhall, Helen McClory [red queen free ebook TXT] 📗

I looked around. Tom’s body beside me, larger and stronger than mine, breathing in and out, hair dishevelled.

‘Ah, no, nothing. Just – what a night, eh?’

Tom in his boxers. Tom next to me, hairs rising on the side of my arm, Tom looking concerned, perhaps, or just puzzled, so hard it is to know beyond the small expressions that our faces can make, have learned how to make, what huge swath of self there is at work in this moment, and the next. The gears of the mind that we suppose are at work, but have only some control over. Against the horrors I wanted, but I had already said something flippant enough to let the other man leave, coward, and there he was going, just as I had guessed and maybe even wanted. Tom shook his head; the last few pieces of hail, miraculously unmelted in his golden hair, were unseated and scattered across the linoleum.

‘Well, off to the shower,’ he said.

But he waited. I said ‘I’m going too. Uh, upstairs,’ I added, with a little nervous laugh. Tom looked at me, again a beat too long, smiled slowly, and left the room.

Entry, Entrances

At Twelfth Night in the year 18— James Lennoxlove went to a ball at a neighbour’s house and saw a murder. This is how I was drawn back into the diary, which had languished on my table overwhelmed by the lives of living people and more incarnate crushes. But after idly reading the first line of that entry, I could not help but pursue, falling heavily into my chair to read on.

At Twelfth Night I went to a ball at Gilmour’s house and came away at midnight in mortal terror and shaking all over after seeing the murder of a maid, committed by if I am correct a groomsman of another guest, the Duke of H—. Even tho I have no thought that anyone should read this, I do not wish to share his name here, in case it is read. The Duke is a powerful man, and I do not know what his feelings might be on the matter, whether it would inconvenience him or cause him some other pains to have the crime come to attention though I know what is right is justice. I have not been well in my mind all night and it is now the morning and I must face the day, but first I give this account. I pray for everyone and the murdered girl most of all, and to know what I must do now.

In Lennoxlove’s telling, unusually disordered as it was, I could see it all: the darkness of the courtyard, back from the fires at the entranceway, the cold mire of horseshit and straw, the stable door open, him looking for something he had left in the saddlebag of his horse, and spying the terrible act, and leaping on the horse, a kick, riding it roughly away without a word to his hosts, and how he thought he heard a shout behind him, though it could have been merrymaking, or someone asking where he was off to in such a hurry. The only thing I did not know was what Lennoxlove looked like, to better imagine his look of fear, his body in the saddle as he gripped the reins and steered the spooked animal down the dark frosty lanes towards his home five miles away. He had never described himself, only other people, which he clearly enjoyed. The neighbour, Gilmour, had ‘a high forehead and nervous complexion, a kind mouth, a rag of handshake’, his wife ‘comely like a calm goose, and I suppose such a thing exists’. So for expediency I imagined Tom in his place.

Lennoxlove wrote in great excitement and despair at what he had seen, and I wondered how I would have responded, if I’d have gone to pieces, rushed in to stop the murder or apprehend the killer, stormed into the great hall – I presumed, the great hall, shining with candelabra – to yell out for all to come and witness what had been done. I played these scenarios and variations in my mind, skirting each time around the act itself, as Lennoxlove had done, sparingly, only giving the detail that it was ‘done with a knife’ and that the groom ‘looked very ill about it, like he was going to faint with the horror, but he was also laughing in bursts, like a mare’, all of which clearly had distressed Lennoxlove and caused his terrible fear and flight.

After reading this entry, I took a short break and opened the bedroom window. It was blue outside. Cold, though never as cold as the cold of my childhood, and probably never would be again, barring freak weather. A cold pale hand on a hot knife, I thought, and shuddered. I stared out at the houses opposite, stolid in the falling, grainy blue, almost all divided like this one, though with more expense and formality, upgraded flats instead of single high-ceilinged loose floorboarded rooms with locks on the doors. Their large stately gardens being either left to gentle neglect – red and yellow trees grown wildly too large, shedding leaves that someone or other might scrape up, eventually – or divided into purse-mouthed squares of gravel or patio paving. A single star caught my attention winking in the slowly vanishing distance between a branch and part of a rooftop. I wondered at the lives being lived at this present moment in this district of the city, somewhere between affluent and haphazard like my own, not thinking overly complex thoughts about them in case I should imagine them knifing each other on mezzanines or by floor-length windows, fresh corpses slithering wetly down the panes like large, clothed slugs – I turned my head, wiped it, turned back – then thought about the lives of those for whom the houses had been built, roughly around the time of Lennoxlove’s day,