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

ran the public parts of their home warm. The last of the catering staff were carrying biodegradable sacks out to their van through the open front door; if they noticed me they didn’t want me to know they had. Kind, I thought. I was barefoot, unshowered and almost round to sobriety, a depressing prospect for anyone to see. I dumped myself on the staircase and waited for them to finish. As they were exiting, one of them looked up at me and gave a louche army salute. I raised two casual fingers, immediately thinking it was like something an emotionally hogtied man might do watching his only brother set out to sea on an unworthy vessel. He closed the door behind him and was gone forever.

‘You’re up,’ said Mark. He was coming from the living room area. He had changed into some less smart clothes, but by anyone’s standards his pyjamas might count as formal wear. Navy silk, matching slippers.

‘Mark,’ I said – I strolled down to meet him business mode on, and in the kitchen we sat on high stools at the marble bar with our faces rearranged in those shadows. The red of the counters only made Mark look even more doughy than usual. He took out something white and thickly creamy from the fridge and began eating it slowly with a tiny spoon.

‘Enjoy yourself?’ Mark said. He was still a little drunk.

‘It’s been a strange night.’

‘I’d imagine,’ he said – smirked.

I sat silent.

‘Do you want anything, Thomas?’ he said, gesturing broadly to the kitchen, ‘we have lots of leftovers. Or I can make you a drink?’

I asked for water. He got up and made me a glass with ice and a cucumber slice from a tub in the fridge. When I had drunk it all down in silence, I was ready.

‘Listen, Mark – I have that book you were talking about. The diary.’

‘Oh really! Yes, I thought you might.’

I stared at him.

‘Daniel took it,’ he said. ‘The idiot stuffed it down his trousers and ran off. I knew you’d moved in with him. And that you might remember our conversation. So . . . ?’

I tried to straighten the timeline in my head – hadn’t he told me before I’d decided to move in? I took a brief tilt towards paranoia. This is a set-up, all that. But I gave up and took out the book. I put it on a clean space on the marble bar and opened it to the back, where I had left the folded piece of paper.

‘Mystery deepens,’ I said.

Mark scoffed in amusement.

‘Look at that.’ He leaned forward and unfolded it. And this is what it said.

An account of himself by James O’Riorden,

written 16 May 1820

You will have read this diary now and perhaps there is no one who will ever see this letter as I will conceal it well but still I have to write it. I am compelled by my moral sense and the awareness of the precarity of my soul for what I have done and what I have not done in the matter I related as if I was James Lennoxlove, the master of the house of Bitterhall. I am not that man. That man is a figment, based on a man of a different name in a similar social position. I am James O’Riorden, no one of importance, a servant only in the house of the other ‘James’. I wrote in his words, unable to tell it myself, and to ease only myself. God forgive me!

I was born in Ireland and taken to [illegible] very young by my mother, three or four years old. My father she left behind and all to the good, she said, that he stayed, and kept his surname with him, while we took another. For this reason I am not afraid to mention O’Riorden here, as there are no records by which to find me. I was raised in a part of that city that is considered a very low place indeed. But still I went to school, because as you can see I write not badly. I learned more refinement in my letters while in the service of the ‘Lennoxlove’ family, the father of ‘James’ requiring even his grooms to be able to read well and keep reliable accounts. This was not out of charity or some noble goal but to enable no man to feign ignorance if some goods of the house or money etcetera went missing. When I was first employed I had additional practice as I was required to keep a legible diary of the horses’ eating habits, stool, teeth, and overall look, so that the master could keep track of their flourishing and make adjustments. Very often he would comment on my dismal handwriting and I would attempt to improve it before he next checked it. This first master ‘Lennoxlove’ was always looking to the improvement of the breed.

But it is about his son I write, the man I wrote as in guise. I was in the barn on the last night of the year (I will take care not to write which year, so that neither I nor he am incriminated). It happened differently to how I said, but I think dear reader you will have guessed so, otherwise why should I write this?

I was nine when I came to the house. James was fourteen and had his schooling by a tutor. The master was in his full health then and very strict; I saw him beat James – nearly a grown man – for riding out late on a fine summer evening. He did beat him in full view of anyone passing, hitting him with a strap until James fell on the courtyard stones. The master made him stand and hit at him again and again, until at last he fell and could not get up. It was as if he were beating me, the pain I felt for James, who I carried