A/N: Written for the WA December Holiday Flash Challenge
She was not certain who she was, or what had happened. Sometimes it seemed she could not think clearly at all, as if parts of her had ebbed away into the great emptiness outside as she played and left behind only a tenous knot of hatred and desire and need, twisting together like smoke. The house moaned about her — Home, she remembered, home and yet a burden — but the fire that flickered forever in the hearth, translucent over dead ashes, did not gutter or blaze up to the long-drawn breaths of the east wind, and the notes of the piano beneath her hands woke no answering vibrations in the air.
There was no reply at all, no presence anywhere. She was utterly alone.
Thomas. She had not known what she needed; the name welled out of her from some place deeper than memory, deeper than thought itself, spinning together wavering strands into a sudden focus of panic and loss.
Thomas— Thomas! She whirled up in panic, knowing now what it was she could not find. He was gone. He could not be gone. They could not take him from her. She could not be left here by herself for always. He could not leave her. He had promised. She had made him promise.
Never apart. It was a litany. Never apart.
Her piano forgotten, she began to drift through the house, desperately searching. The roof had come down at last in the west wing, just as it had failed long since in the great hall where the dead leaves drifted at the foot of the stairs, and the wind sent in little dry flurries of snow along the corridor outside her room, and toyed with the ragged counterpane. In her shattered mind it was another midwinter so very long ago, and she was seeking Thomas as a terrified child, fingers twisting in her long dark plait, half-sick with guilt and fear.
Father had been out of the country again, in Monte Carlo, and their mother had been asked to a house-party for Christmas at Haversett, a four-hour drive away across the moor. There would be dancing, and glittering company, and children were not invited, Lady Sharpe had told her small, excited daughter in a tone of dismissal that left no doubt. Even at eight years old she had begun to understand that Mother did not want them, had never wanted them, and that if their father had been home Mother would not have been permitted this excursion either. Mother wanted nothing more than to escape them all, and for one precious night she would do so; wear jewels once again in the thick dark hair that had yet to go iron-grey, and pretend for one last time that she was a girl again in London, and not an aging wife trapped in a marriage of mutual misery in the barren wilds of the north.
There could be no question of driving back that night. The children would be left to their own devices under the desultory care of Jenny, the nursery-maid, and the coachman would bring Lady Sharpe home in the morning.
A whole day and a night on their own, to run as wild as they pleased without fear of scolding or punishment! It was almost as good as being allowed to go to a party — a real party like the ones in story-books, not an evening full of boring grown-ups. And both children had seen enough to know by then in their secret hearts that there would never be any parties for them save whatever pretence they could make between themselves.
Thomas at six had lost whatever trace of chubbiness he had ever possessed. He was a slender, elfin child with a shy smile that bloomed for his sister alone and a flinching look in his wideset eyes that she did not share. At the age of eight she had long since learned to love him more than the cold, hostile woman who had borne them; she loved him sometimes with a protective fervour that made her heart ache, but no trace of womanhood had yet come to stir her passions into forbidden desires and bewilderment. They were innocents, still, the two of them, and inseparable.
They had played all afternoon at making their own private Christmas tree up in the nursery, using candles stolen from the kitchen when Mother was not there to forbid it, and childish baubles made in paper and scraps of wool to Thomas' devising, hung on a bough his sister had dragged in from the park. It was Thomas, younger than she, who had first tired of the game and clamoured instead to play hide-and-seek, but the idea had instant appeal. With both parents out of the house, it had been a golden opportunity.
They'd hidden themselves in all the forbidden places, pulling open doors and fingering furnishings in the rooms they were not allowed to touch. Greatly daring, she had crept in amongst Mother's dresses, concealing herself with the crisp taffeta that little girls' sticky fingers must not crush, and pulled aside the heavy drapes over the alcoves in their father's bedroom, pretending she could not hear her brother's breathless giggles from the telltale mound under the counterpane. Thomas had hidden ineffectually between the legs of Mother's piano downstairs, and behind a coatstand in the corner, and curled up in the library with a pile of books on his head, and in the end she'd got bored of the joke and told him to go off and find a proper hiding-place. Then he'd disappeared.
She hadn't been afraid at first. Not until she had searched everywhere again and again in the gathering dusk, and sour-faced Jenny admitted to hearing "bangin' about an' screamin'" and having thought nothing of it.
The screaming had gone silent. That was the worst of it.
She relived those hours now, mindlessly calling and calling his name. But the great muniment-chest in the attic with its treacherous catch lay long since mouldered and gaping like their father's bones. Once she'd flung back the lid in a panic with the last ounce of her strength, to find Thomas trapped insensible and barely breathing within its coffin-like confines; now it was no longer solid enough to ensnare a small boy, let alone a man full-grown, and the beloved she sought was not awaiting her there, nor yet when she searched further — much further — afield...
Thomas... A terrible knowledge lay somewhere beyond the edges of awareness, but she would not admit it in. She ranged out over the moor, slipping traceless between the whirling flakes. On the wet ground snow had melted and refrozen, murky with scarlet-tinted mud.
At the foot of the high fells beyond, where the stone walls straggled down to the sheep-intakes, the ground lay churned by hooves and wheels on the steep track that bridged the beck and led into Coningsby. She'd ridden out that way, in the old days. A few narrow streets clustered round the market-square, with houses grey and bleak as the hills behind a church where the women had whispered and stared, and a handful of grander villas: the parson, solicitor, town clerk. There was a presence here. It drew her, and hate gave her fresh strength.
The girl. Edith. In a low house near the bridge there was a lamp left burning in the parlour, lighting the room for any passer-by to see. And there she was, as bold as brass, sitting by the fire all huddled up in a mass of shawls. There was a drawn grey look to her cheek where the livid scar burned, and it was clear she had been ill — perhaps deathly ill.
That was good; very good. But it was not enough. Hatred made it easy to pass through into the house unseen.
She took him. Certainty came on a wave. She has him, I know it. She has him...
There was a man in the parlour, but it was not Thomas. And he should have been dead.
The American. Corn-fed, square-cut, self-righteous... The faithful follower.
He had reached out to take Edith's hand as a brother might; but there were brothers, and then there were brothers. And the small steady movements of that hand for comfort told more than he realised, to one with eyes to see.
He should be dead. She could not say why she was so certain, but she knew it. He too was gaunt, with an ashen pallor despite the Yankee tan, and he moved with the shaky care of the very old, or of the convalescent who must husband his strength, but he should not have been alive at all.
Thomas killed him. A fierce remembered flush of triumph confirmed it: Thomas, and the interloper dead, and the look on Edith's face. And pride, in a brother ready at last to take place at her side. Yes, I— I made Thomas kill him.
Blood. Blood on her hands, blood on his, warm and vital, binding them together. Always together. Never apart...
Howling emptiness came over her once more. Yet instinct had not led her wrong, for it was of Thomas that they spoke, these two whom she hated.
~o~
"You want me to perjure myself for Thomas Sharpe, Edith?"
"Alan, please—"
"You want me to stand up in court and swear that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth and that those corpses they dragged from the vats in the basement were all his crazy sister's doing, and that he didn't happen to sink four inches of steel into my gut?"
"Oh, Alan, I'm not asking you to lie. Just... just tell them what they can believe. Do you think I mean to tell them about the ghosts? That Enola's spirit came to me, and all the rest?"
A sigh from Alan.
"It's about more than ghost stories, though, isn't it?" His tone was almost gentle. "It's about hushing up scandal; keeping the worst of it away from his precious name... So tell me — who is Sir Thomas Sharpe to me that I should shield him from everything he ever did to you?"
"My husband." Edith turned her hand over softly in his clasp, and withdrew it to brush for a moment against his cheek. "The man who spared your life for my sake, the only way he knew how. The man who did his best at the last to save both of us, and paid for it. Oh, I can't forgive him either, for the lies and the love and the horror, but I can't hate him."
Her laugh was a quick sob of breath. "He said he loved me... You're a doctor: can you tell me how a man can court someone in cold blood and give her poison with his own hands and then risk everything to save her? It takes bitterness to survive in this place; he taught me that. Love isn't noble or pure — it's messy and ugly and tears you in two, just as he tried to tell me before any of this began. Only I didn't understand, not then— not then..."
There was a blind look in her eyes and she stumbled to her feet. Alan struggled to follow suit and catch her as she swayed, but she had buried her face in her hands, and her words struck home oblivious. "Oh Thomas, Thomas — why couldn't we just have gone away as I wanted? Oh, why did we ever go back to Crimson Peak?"
Alan could not hide an instinctive flinch of his own that mirrored the unseen onlooker's fury. But he reached out to Edith again and gathered her close, scarcely any more steady on his feet than she, while the wind set shadows dancing behind them in the fire. The heaving breaths hidden against his shoulder turned at last to sobs in truth, and ebbed away to silence within the quiet circle of his arms.
"There was a child that died." She was whispering the words as if that could make them less true. "Her child — her own brother's child. How could he? Oh, it's horrible..."
"He loved you, at the end," Alan said steadily above her bent head, gazing into the shadows with eyes that did not see. "You can take it from me; you know I—"
He caught himself back. After a moment his cheek sank down slowly to rest against Edith's piled hair.
"You can take it from me," Alan said again, very gently, and for the space of a long breath there was no sound in the room save the desolation in the wind.
Edith stirred, and looked up. Her voice was bitter with pain. "She made him what he was; she caught him into that dance of death — Lucille."
~o~
Lucille. It was as if a great dam of memory had burst: hatred, betrayal and deadly purpose, sweeping away for a moment the anguish of what had just been overheard.
Lucille. She was Lucille. She remembered... and for one instant of glory, she was almost whole.
Only she would never be whole, not ever again. Thomas was all she had, all she would ever have, all she wanted, and he had betrayed her — for them.
She remembered the cleaver. Remembered going after Edith to finish the job, as she had done with Mother, as she had done...
No. No. She turned and fled wildly, away from that final memory she could not face, away from Thomas's lost and glazing eyes. He had not fought her, even at the last. He had been hers. Why had he not understood that? He was meant to be hers.
She could not bear it. The wind whipped over the moor, tearing away awareness, tearing away passion, and somehow, she did not know how, the piano keys were under her hands again, moving and yet not moving at their old mindless pace. While she played she need not think — only exist as a shadow of what she had been.
The house creaked and groaned on sinking foundations, rotting... dying. Everything she had done, she had done for the house, and for Thomas; to keep his inheritance and to keep him safe, the two of them left alone against the world.
Of all those fortunes she had found for him she had not kept one penny. It was invested, all of it, in Thomas's hopes, Thomas's work, with her strength steadfast at his side. Lucille Sharpe wore other women's gowns ten years out of fashion and laboured in the kitchen like a scullery-maid. For his sake she had asked nothing for herself... save the child.
She had wanted the child, when it came, with a desperation that shook her. She had always known she could not have what other women had: no slow, delicate dance of courtship, no flushed triumph to turn a suitor's head, no white wedding and no rose-petal cheek to nestle at her breast. She had Thomas, utterly, and from his bed her fierce delight. And in that all-consuming need the rest was of no account.
They could not have children. She knew the risks of such a birth; even if she could pass a baby off as pity's impulse for some foundling brat, she had no desire to find herself endowed with some cretinous creature or incest-bred deformity. She'd brought up Thomas almost alone since she was old enough to remember. He was all the child she would ever need. And so she'd been careful, very, very careful, for all those years.
Until Milan.
Until that one sultry spring when she'd been distracted by jealousy, and hunger for comfort, and perhaps just pure bad luck. But by the time her brother had done as she bid and brought home another bovine, convenient heiress, there could no longer be any doubt. She'd felt the movement within her, and her shame had been starting to show.
She'd hated Enola Sciotti, for her placid kindness, her lack of blame, and her unburdened freedom of movement in those months when Lucille dared not leave the house. The English lady's lover had left her? Enola's dear sister was not to worry. They would take care of the baby together. And soon, God and her sweet Thomas willing — a shrug of a plump shoulder and a blush — there would be another little one to keep his cousin company...
She'd watched the other woman covet her growing belly with open yearning for a child of her own; watched Thomas with furious, jealous eyes lest he should weaken of finding excuses for his wife's empty bed. She'd felt little but scorn for the others, while they'd lasted, but she'd hated Enola and her little yapping dog.
The woman should have been dealt with long before winter, for even such a fool could not help growing suspicious, but Lucille had been utterly dependent on her by then for the work of the house, humiliated as she was by her own ungainly bulk. A Christmas baby, Enola had promised, stroking her hair. A blessing on this house for the New Year.
She had begun to cough. Lucille dared not give her the full dose, not yet, but she meant to waste no time once the birth was over.
Thomas's child, she told herself when her imaginings that month were at their worst. And small Thomas had been so flawless, so delicate. Surely her baby would resemble him? Surely it would not be punished for what its parents had done?
Of the confinement itself she remembered only pain. She had been past the age for a first child, but the midwife — summoned prudently from far Carlisle — had pronounced it a quick labour, and without complications. Exhausted, Lucille received the baby upon her breast with little more than a haze of relief.
Then the tiny scrap of life uncreased its face and looked at her with Thomas's wide and wondering eyes, and she'd felt a pang of possessive love so fierce that it hurt. Her daughter was perfect; perfect from head to toe. In the distance she could hear Enola yammering — sobbing out some prayer of thanks, no doubt — but here and now there were only the two of them. She was cradling the smallest and most precious creature in the world.
"Lady Sharpe, my dear— Sir Thomas— I am so very sorry." The midwife was back. Lucille paid the woman no heed. Her eyes were all for Thomas, leaning over her with a look of concern. She smiled back at him, raising herself a little to show him their daughter.
The midwife was patting her hand. "Sometimes the Lord lends us these souls just for a little while, until he calls them back among the angels—"
"What do you mean?" Lucille snapped, trying to sit up, and caught her breath in pain. "Thomas, tell her—"
But Thomas was gazing down at the two of them in anguish, and the baby had begun to cry.
She still could not see it. Not at first. And then their daughter's head had fallen back to show the monstrous cleft that split apart her squalling mouth.
"I've seen this before, Sir Thomas." The midwife had taken his arm and was speaking in a low voice. "That infant will just fade and fail. She can't suckle — she's born wrong. It's a blessing in a way, for she'll never really speak, you know, or learn as other children do... Your wife's a healthy woman; let her forget this child, then try again."
Far away across the moor the Christmas bells were ringing out. Lucille had sunk back against the pillows and felt the first slow tears slip from beneath closed eyes.
"Lucille." Thomas had come to her, later, half-sick with misery. "Do you want me to—"
She should have let him take that mercy for them both: Thomas, her poor Thomas who had never so much as drowned a litter of kittens and yet had made the offer for her sake. But she'd wanted the baby desperately, and instead she'd let herself believe Enola's lies.
Enola had promised she could save the child. Promised she would spoon pap into it every hour, day and night, if that was what it took, as eagerly as if she had known that her own life, long since outworn like her fortune, hung precisely upon her utility to Lucille.
The child had sucked weakly at the teat and choked up milk, and all the same finally withered and died. And Enola and all her possessions had gone down to join the other wives, like the used-up husks beneath a spider's web. Save that Enola alone had lasted long enough to understand what was coming. Lucille had hated her enough to make sure of that.
Now they were gone, all gone, and she was alone and broken. Thomas should be here. He could not do this to her. He had no right...
Dawn's first light drove her out again across the moors, searching desperately for a truth she could not admit. He was not in the house. He was not upstairs, where the papers had burned. He was not outside, where the snow had been crimson beneath Edith's stumbling feet and now lay deep and untrodden. He was not in that drained and waxen thing that lay unmoving in an icy outhouse, on a trestle alongside another, veiled for decency save for long dark hair—
Edith! Edith was there, seated in Coningsby's adjoining hall amid a crowd of goggling rustics. Blind now to all else, Lucille swept down in a frenzy of impotent hate.
~o~
The Coroner wore a spotted silk handkerchief around his neck, and the jury had half a dozen mufflers between them. The coke stove in the corner gave out a little sullen smoke and less heat, but the room was abuzz with anticipation and there was scarcely a spare seat to be found.
"You may recall that these proceedings were previously adjourned on the grounds that the two principal witnesses were in no physical condition to give their evidence." The Coroner's dry voice creaked a little, as if from disuse. "I'm glad to see that they are both present today and in considerably better health... I therefore propose to proceed with the evidence of Dr Alan McMichael. In view of your injuries, doctor, you are at liberty to give your evidence seated, if you prefer... Thank you: a chair for Dr McMichael, please ...the truth and nothing but the truth... Now, perhaps you would be good enough to give an account of precisely how it was these wounds of yours were acquired, and under what circumstances?"
"I'm a family friend of Miss Cush— of Lady Sharpe, sir." Alan had made his way to the front of the hall using a cane, but his words now were measured and steady. "When we received no communication of any kind from her after the wedding, I began to think it strange; when I subsequently learned of the tragic events at Allerdale Hall some twenty years earlier —the Beatrice Sharpe case—"
He broke off. There had been a rising murmur among the audience, as of old scandal recalled with pleasurable horror.
"Silence, if you please." The Coroner quelled the interruption with a weary glance. "Dr McMichael, kindly continue."
"When I learned of that previous tragedy and of Sir Thomas's prior marriage, I became gravely concerned as to her welfare. And as you know, sir, in the event my concerns proved all too terribly justified."
Further reaction in the hall, equally swiftly quelled.
"If you would kindly confine yourself to matters of your own observation, doctor? Evidence has already been taken on the subject of the... remains found in the basement." The Coroner cleared his throat. "But in fact at the time of your arrival at Allerdale Hall you were not aware of anything of the sort?"
"No, sir," Alan admitted honestly. "My concern was that Miss Cushing had been trapped into a false marriage, not that she was in immediate danger. But when I found her on the floor—"
"One moment, please. Would you be so good as to tell the jury in what condition you found her?"
"She had suffered injuries consistent with having fallen a considerable height a matter of minutes earlier. She was also anaemic, terrified, and in my professional opinion showed all the signs of having been subjected to progressive poisoning. Given my existing fears as to her marital situation, I concluded that despite the weather it was essential to remove her from that house immediately." He hesitated for the first time. "But when I challenged the Sharpes as to Edith's condition and the events of the past... Lucille stabbed me."
"In response to your verbal accusations?"
"And my intention of removing Edith. Yes."
"So your extensive injuries were not the result, for example, of some quarrel with Sir Thomas over your attentions to the lady who was in fact his wife?"
"What? No!" Alan's outrage held utter conviction. "I had been in the house a matter of minutes. Even had Lady Sharpe ever regarded me as anything other than purely a family friend, and I fully admit that it is with regret that I say she has not, there was no opportunity for any such misbehaviour or quarrel to take place. Lucille Sharpe attacked me simply in order to prevent my assisting the victim whom — in my opinion, then and now — it was her intention to kill."
"And you did not, at any time before or after receiving these wounds, lay one finger upon Lucille herself, even in self-defence?"
"No."
"And how did you come to survive this frenzied attack?"
"I lost consciousness." Alan hesitated again. "Lucille must have believed me dead. At any rate Sir Thomas concealed me from her."
"From his own sister? Whom he had just witnessed attempting murder?"
"Yes, sir."
"And then what did he do?"
Alan's mouth tightened, as if in remembered anguish. "Edith was in danger. He went to save his wife... and there was nothing I could do to aid either of them."
Heads turned in the court amid a low wave of sympathy as Dr McMichael limped slowly back to his former seat and Edith, Lady Sharpe, took his place as witness. She gave her identity in a low voice, and confirmed the doctor's story of her fall.
"And was this fall accidental, Lady Sharpe?"
"No. She —my sister-in-law— pushed me."
Another, indignant murmur from the audience. This time the Coroner let it pass.
"And why was that?"
"I'd found evidence," Edith said quietly. "Recordings — photographs — papers. Evidence about the dead women in that house, and how they died. She couldn't let me live. And when Alan —Dr McMichael— came, he knew too much. So he too had to die."
Her breath hitched a moment. "She was mad, quite mad, but I didn't know it until then. I thought— I thought I was the only one left alive. So when she came for me, I stabbed her. With my pen. It was all I had."
She had begun to speak faster and faster. "And then I ran. Thomas went to stop her, but he never came back. And I ran. She came after me, and she—" With one hand she touched her cheek, where the livid scar of a knife still showed. "She wouldn't stop coming. She would have killed me. She would have killed Alan. She wouldn't stop. So I hit her with the shovel, and she died."
And amid all the tumult in the court her head came up, and she saw Lucille; saw her, as none of those around them could see. Saw her in a way that stripped away the memory of flesh and bone, and left only a shadow of immaterial rage.
"I killed Lucille Sharpe," Edith said softly as their eyes met. Every word was a weapon. "She killed Thomas, and I killed her. And whatever remains of her now is less than nothing... only one more howling ghost amid those she left in her wake."
~o~
It was not true. It was not true. But the world and time itself slipped away from her clawing grasp, and she was back at the piano, back in the dark, back in the house where Thomas had betrayed her, and bled, and died with that terrible lost look as if it were she who had somehow failed him... When she screamed, it was the wailing of the wind in the chimneys, and all her frenzy could not stir the dust.
Eternity passed. Edith came.
Lucille struck at her, but Edith was untouched and unafraid. She wore primrose-colour, like the coming of spring, and beside that brightness the house around her seemed already withered in decay.
"I came to tell you we leave for Southampton tomorrow," Edith said quietly. "You have your wish, Lucille. You fought tooth and nail to keep this house and lands, and now you need never leave. No-one will ever lay a finger on them again. You sacrificed every scrap of humanity you ever had for this, and now you will be part of it for all time."
Locked away — alone — alone— Lucille fought in panic to shape the air through sheer force of will in an insubstantial throat. All that came out was a long moan. "Thomas..."
Edith's face contorted.
"Look for him in the past, Lucille, for you won't find him here!" She took a breath. "The two of you were always chained to the past, weren't you? You kept him chained there by fear and guilt and love twisted beyond repair... until you chose to take a blade to that bond. Now he is gone ahead where neither of us can follow, to a rest that you will never know and I can only await. Did you think you could bind him to you for all eternity? We made our goodbyes, he and I; yours were dealt at the point of a knife.
"The inquest is over with Yuletide swift on its heels, and Thomas is dead and buried, no unquiet ghost. In their eyes, he died a hero's death, wresting the blade from your hands in defence of the innocents in his house against the sister he'd so blindly trusted... your last tragic victim. They'll remember you with horror, but he is clear and free."
She laughed a little, tenderly. "Poor Alan. He helped me, but he didn't like doing it. I used to be as honest as Alan once, before I came to Allerdale Hall... I haven't told him you're still here. He's suffered enough for my sake; he doesn't need your spectre hanging over us, ill-wishing us. They found for self-defence, and Alan and I are free to leave. We sail from Southampton in the New Year, and all this will be at an end."
At an end for Edith, perhaps, but for Lucille— Drifting on the air, she tried again desperately to speak; to threaten or to beg, she did not know. But all that was permitted to her was the same long broken cry, and this time Edith herself lost control.
"Thomas is gone — gone, and you killed him. Is there enough of you left to understand that? You took him from me twice: once when he died, and once when you made a monster of him before we ever met!"
Eternity passed. Edith was gone, weeping. One winter after another took roof and walls, and what little remained of Lucille's mind.
She could not remember who she was, or whom it was she sought. She knew only that she hated, and that she was driven by a single desolate need.
The ruins of Allerdale Hall were reckoned ill-omened in after years among those who passed, even when men had long forgotten why. But the whisper had sprung up that, for those with eyes to see, the Black Lady of Allerdale played endlessly in a lullaby for the lost, caught in a hell of her own making.