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Jem had shared the attic bedroom with Thomas for long enough to have been able to predict, with absolute certainty, that he would effectively be conducting most of this nocturnal vigil alone.
Thomas was blessed with a childlike ability to be able to drop off within seconds and slumber peacefully through just about anything, including Walter Cox’s warthog snoring. In his case, the word wake was tinged with heavy irony. Within a couple of hours Thomas’s head had fallen back against the wall, and he was breathing softly, mouth open.
The brandy had played its part, of course. Jem gave the flask an experimental shake: Thomas had been so keen to take the edge off his unease that he must have downed three-quarters of it. As Jem had predicted.
He unscrewed the cap and took a swig of what remained.
Thomas was positioned on the other side of the bed, on a chair by the door. Jem got up and went tentatively over, circling the flask in front of Thomas’s blank face. When his eyelids didn’t flicker, Jem let out a long breath, and, treading softly, went to the heavy mahogany cabinet by the window.
Candles burned low on each side of the bed, but their meagre light didn’t reach the shelves behind the glass. He reached to pick one up, and the movement caused the flame to waver, so that it seemed almost like, inside the coffin, the old man’s waxy face had twitched. Jem’s heart faltered.
He was more nervous than he thought.
Only because this was the kind of chance he’d been waiting for, he told himself. A golden opportunity to look for personal papers, photographs, letters—anything that might reveal information about Viscount Frensham’s visit to Coldwell in November 1902. And this time he wasn’t going to let anything distract him, as it had on the night of the fair when he’d swapped beds with Joseph.
He hadn’t realised Mrs Furniss would wake so easily, or that she would be so shaken by the excuse he’d invented for creeping through the upstairs rooms of the sleeping house. He hadn’t been prepared for how guilty he would feel about lying to her; guilty and ashamed and faintly grubby. Nor had he known that glimpse of her before the candle blew out—in her nightgown, with her hair coming loose around her face—would stay with him as vividly and disturb him as much.
He could have asked her for the key to the library—she would almost certainly have given it to him, along with a cast-iron excuse for going in there, but in that moment his conscience had got the better of him. He’d regretted it afterwards.
Now was his chance to make up for it.
He moved the candle along the cabinet’s shelves, so the flame illuminated the yellow spines of Wisden’s cricketing almanacks, books about native Indian birds, fly-fishing, and dog breeds, as well as several small blue cloth-bound volumes that looked like prayer books. They jostled for space alongside a delicate bird’s skull, a piece of rock, and an ivory statuette of an Indian god.
Jem’s eyes swept over them without interest. Putting the candle down on the small ledge in front of the glass doors, he opened one of the drawers and was confronted with folded silk handkerchiefs, a leather collar box, and a tray of shirt studs. In the drawer below he found striped nightshirts, and was about to shut it again when he noticed more of the little blue volumes he had thought were prayer books tucked against the side of the drawer.
No one needed that many prayer books.
He pushed the nightshirts aside. Bringing the candle closer, he took one of the books out and flipped it open. The pages were densely covered in a spidery scrawl, smudged and splotched in places, almost impossible to read. However, at the top of each page was a printed date.
Diaries.
Jem’s fingers were trembling as he turned the brittle pages to the beginning. He’d hardly dared hope to hit the jackpot so easily. On the reverse side of the marbled flyleaf Sir Henry had written the year: 1897. Holding the book next to the candle Jem attempted to read the first page.
January 1st. Rain all day. Blasted gout giving me bother. Staff on poor form after last night’s servants’ ball—vexing. Telegraphed back to R., refusing request for funds. V unsatisfactory. Wish he would come home and face responsibilities here instead of gadding about India. C. very low about the whole affair. Poor show.
It took a long time to decipher the crabbed writing, and hardly repaid the effort; Henry Hyde wasn’t much of a diarist. Jem assumed R. must be Randolph and C. his mother (Constance? Clarissa?). He flicked through the book, trying to pick out more mentions of R., but Hyde seemed to be more preoccupied with his gout (Confounded pain in my foot… Had Seymour out again—wish to God he could do something for me… Quack suggests the spa baths at Harrogate for my gout…) and the weather, which he recorded in monotonous detail.
Jem slid the book back into its slot and removed one four volumes along. The date was underlined with a sweeping stroke on the endpaper.
1902
The year of the last entry in the Coldwell visitors’ book. The year after Jem had moved to Hampshire and Jack had taken his place. The year that Viscount Frensham had taken up residence for the winter at Ward Abbey, one of his father’s smaller estates in Norfolk, and Jack had been amongst the servants to go with him.
The year he had disappeared.
The window was open and (at the advice of the undertaker) the room was cool, but Jem could feel sweat on his upper lip, his forehead. He opened the book randomly, skimming the entry for 18 May: Easterly wind. Cold. Indigestion very bad, leg swollen. Saw no one but Goddard. Miss the old girl.
His wife’s death at some point in the intervening volumes must have provided some variation in Hyde’s daily observations, but Jem didn’t have time to look. He turned a wedge of pages, and his eye caught on an entry in August: Sir Henry had received a letter from Randolph, saying that he was returning to England, setting sail from Bombay the following week. No explanation, but one imagines a tight spot of some sort—finances or females. Etchingham may have heard word. Perhaps just as well his mother is not here to see it.
Spots danced before Jem’s eyes. He looked up from the book and took a breath—in and out. The stopped clock gave him no clue as to the time, but light was beginning to seep beneath the edges of the blind; the house would soon be waking up. His hand was shaking properly as he flicked through the pages.
A noise.
Alarm ricocheted through his body as he listened and heard the creak of floorboards beneath the thick carpet of the corridor. He shoved the book back into the drawer, ramming it shut, and by the time the door handle moved, he was beside the window, leaning back against the folded shutter, as if he was just stretching his legs and getting some air.
Hyde’s valet slipped into the room like fog. Beneath his slicked-back hair his high forehead creased as he saw Jem at the window. He looked down at Thomas, slumped in the chair at his side. His eyes moved to the cabinet. Following his gaze, Jem saw that the drawer was open a fraction, the cuff of a nightshirt trapped in it.
‘Everything all right?’