The final cut ("Afterwards")

[igenlode]

Here's the heavily shortened version of my 'holiday' fic for competition purposes, reduced from 6000 words to 3800; it will be interesting to see how a full version stands up alongside it!

I really don't like the title 'Monsters', not least because several of the original references to this theme have now been excised. So I ideally need a new title and a summary overnight...

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Afterwards

She could not find Thomas. And the world was breaking apart.

She was not certain who she was, or what had happened. It was as if parts of her had ebbed away to leave only a tenuous knot of hatred and desire and need, twisting together like smoke. The house moaned about her, but 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. The name welled up from some place deeper than memory, spinning together wavering strands into a sudden focus of panic and loss.

Thomas— Thomas! 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, and the wind sent 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 a terrified child, seeking him half-sick with guilt and fear.

Father had been out of the country again, 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 pretend for one last time that she was a girl again in London, and not 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.

Thomas at six had lost whatever chubbiness he had ever possessed. He was a slender, elfin child with a 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, 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, with childish baubles of 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 with both parents out of the house it had been a golden opportunity.

They had concealed themselves in all the forbidden places, pulling open doors and fingering furnishings in the rooms they were not allowed to touch. 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, and she’d searched everywhere again and again in the gathering dusk.

She relived those hours now in panic, calling and calling his name. But the great muniment-chest in the attic with its treacherous catch was long since mouldered and gaping, and this time the beloved she sought was not to be found within its coffin-like confines, nor yet 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 snowflakes.

At the foot of the high fells beyond, where the stone walls straggled down to the sheep-intakes, the ground lay churned by hoofs and wheels on the steep track that bridged the beck and led into Coningsby. A few narrow streets clustered round the market-square, with houses grey and bleak as the hills behind. 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, all huddled up by the fire 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.

She took him. Certainty came in a wave, unthinking. 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.

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 too was gaunt, with an ashen pallor beneath his 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. I— I made Thomas kill him.

Blood. Blood on her brother’s hands, blood on hers, 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, 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 stick four inches of steel into my gut?”

“Oh, Alan, I’m not asking you to lie... 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, Alan. 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. She was Lucille. She remembered, and for one instant of glory she was almost whole.

Only she would never be whole, never 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 moving under her hands again. While she played she need not think — only exist as a shadow of what she had been.

Everything she had done, she had done for Thomas, to keep him safe; the two of them 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. 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. She had Thomas, utterly, and in 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 imbecile 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, 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 started to show.

She’d hated Enola Sciotti for her placid kindness in those months when Lucille dared not leave the house, and her lack of blame. 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.

The woman should have been dealt with long before winter, 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 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.

Of the confinement itself, she remembered only pain. 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.

“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.” The midwife had taken his arm and was speaking in a low voice. “That infant can’t suckle — she was 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.”

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 that pledge.

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. Only Enola had lasted long enough to understand what was coming. Lucille had hated her enough to make sure of that.

Dawn’s first light drove her out again across the moors, searching desperately for a truth she could not admit. Thomas should be here. 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 about 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, since 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 am 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.... Now, doctor, perhaps you could give us an account of how these injuries 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 heard nothing at all 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— when I learned of that previous tragedy and of Sir Thomas’ prior marriage, I became gravely concerned. And as you know, sir, in the event my concerns proved all too terribly justified. 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 thought it best 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.”

“And 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; 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 how did you come to survive this frenzied attack?”

“I lost consciousness.” Alan paused 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 help 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 affirmed 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.”

An indignant murmur from the audience. 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. 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.”

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.

“She killed Thomas,” Edith said softly, with bitter force. “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 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. She wore primrose-colour, like the coming of spring, and beside that brightness the house around her seemed already withered in decay.

“You have your wish, Lucille. We leave for Southampton tomorrow. 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 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. “You kept him chained to you by fear and guilt and love twisted beyond repair... until you chose to cut him away. Now he is gone ahead where neither of us can follow, to a rest that you will never know and I can only await. The inquest is over 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... 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. We sail from Southampton in the New Year, and all this will be an at end.”

At an end for Edith, maybe, but for Lucille— But all that was permitted 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.