What has happened?
Dead – dead again – all dead. Is she dead?
A cold hand grasps the back of her neck and shakes her.
Her mother brings her back.
She has seconds, maybe, before people arrive. The shot will have been heard throughout the house.
It cannot end now.
She is not finished. Not without Claudine.
On the landing she hears a commotion downstairs – people are coming, voices, a clamour. Only a split second to make her decision – so she runs, breathless, shaking, up to one landing, then the next, and the next, this endlessly tall house, these endless, useless rooms. Here a vase her mother purchased on her honeymoon, here a print of her father riding in the Herne Hunt. The sound of the gas burning follows her like a hissing crowd. She is the villain, she is wanted dead.
A scream comes from somewhere behind her.
They have found him.
What will they think?
A suicide?
It would not be so surprising, after all. Mother dead, sister drowned. A poor fool with no taste for life.
Claudine will know better.
In her mother’s studio at the top of the house, Odette stops at last, breathing hard, throat on fire with the effort. The lights have not been lit here, so she slips through the dark, between the broken fragments of her mother’s legacy. A torn canvas here, a broken brush there.
How long can she hide?
No – she cannot hide.
That will get her nowhere.
She has a better idea.
The subtlety of her hearing has slowly returned, and shelistens more closely to the tumult of voices, all these new servants Claudine commands.
She is their mistress, but she stands alone.
They are not so mismatched now. Odette against Claudine. That is how it has been since her mother died.
Odette goes to the landing outside the studio and gives a knock on the banister.
It is not so loud.
She knocks again, slowly, steadily.
Does she have Claudine’s attention? She does not know.
She goes to the centre of the room and taps on the floorboards.
Tap-tap-tap.
There – a creak on the stairs below. Someone is coming up.
Someone scared.