Mr King steps to one side, and this time, when she passes, he puts a hand on her waist as if to help her through, though it is only a step from the room to the landing and she needs nothing from him.
He has won. She has failed again.
4
Odette
ODETTE WAITS FOR NIGHTFALLbefore she begins.
The household is not up late; they are not entertaining tonight, and soon Mrs Binx is securing the shutters and the doors. Odette lies in Lydia’s studio, where the workmen have made a mess of everything: a foot put through a canvas, brushes snapped and paints shoved haphazardly to one side. Here, she listens. There is the turn of the key and the scrape of the bolt. The steady footsteps patrolling the hallways to snuff out each gas lamp. The murmured goodnights.
Then – silence.
The Hampstead house is nothing like Herne House. It has no maze of forgotten passageways and priest holes, no easy way to step into the gaps between worlds – but that does not mean it is impossible. Cecilia has shown her one or two places where the veil grows thin: the airing cupboard into which a whole person can fit and conceal themselves behind the laundry, the turn in the stairs where, stood just so, a body can disappear.
And downstairs, there was once a connecting door between Lydia’s room and the blue room, where George and Claudine now sleep. In the blue room, the door was nailed shut and papered over, but in Lydia’s room, the deep alcove into which the door was set prevented this, and instead a wardrobe was pushed in front of it. Cecilia once discovered that, with a littlecare, it was possible to wriggle behind the wardrobe and into the alcove.
Odette listens to the church bells chime through the night, until she marks a quarter to three. She slithers downstairs and into her mother’s bedroom, then worms her way into her hiding place.
It is too dark to see a thing, but she can feel the shape of the door, the hinges, the handle that has no counterpart. On the other side, her father and her aunt lie together. Behind her is her mother’s deathbed.
With a slow and firm hand, she gives three loud knocks.
Silence reigns.
Perhaps only the scuffle of a mouse in the walls.
Carefully, three more loud knocks.
Now, a shifting. She imagines Claudine rising up on her elbow, blinking around the dark room, half in a dream.
Three knocks in sharp succession.
Did she imagine it? Was that a gasp?
Odette lets the tension draw out, fine as a knifepoint. Just when she imagines that Claudine might be lying down again, she knocks low, near the floor, a steady drumbeat, slow enough that she can hear movement in the room.
Footsteps on the other side of the door. Claudine is up.
Hissed words, then a low voice. She has roused George.
Odette stops.
Murmured voices. A rising frustration in Claudine’s tone until she grows loud enough for the words to break through.
‘—am not mad.’
Hmm. Yes. Now.
Odette gives a single knock.
The silence that follows is exquisite. She can picture them both, George sat up in bed, Claudine stood beside him in her nightgown, staring at the wall that separates them from Lydia’sdeath room.
She gives three short raps.
‘Hello?’ says Claudine.
Three more raps.