Page 11 of All of Us Murderers

“‘Modern plays’,” Hawley repeated mockingly. “What do you have in mind, George Bernard Shaw? I dare say Candida will still be playing next year. Personally, I preferred How He Lied to Her Husband. Didn’t you, Bram?”

That froze the entire company, as well it might. Bram’s face went an ugly shade of crimson. Elise’s expression didn’t alter but her eyes were lethal.

“I prefer musical comedy,” Zeb announced loudly, since nobody else was going to save them. “I must have seen The Toreador three times.”

“You would,” Bram spat, turning his ire on the easier target. “The amount of childish rubbish spewed onto the London stage to exploit the lowest common denominators of human nature—”

“You mean, things people like,” Zeb said, knowing he was being drawn in even as he said it, but unable to help himself.

“Facile pap and nonsense, consumed uncritically by the mob.”

“What’s facile is judging a musical revue by the same criteria you use for an Ibsen drama. It makes as much sense as condemning an iced bun for not being a chateaubriand.”

“That is to say, one is a different and lesser object,” Bram said triumphantly.

“What about ghost stories?” Hawley put in, with his astonishing knack for making things worse. “I suppose you include those in your condemnation of popular entertainment? Mere childish rubbish?”

“Ghost stories are not rubbishy,” Jessamine said clearly. “They are true. I told you they are true. This house is haunted.”

“Jessamine,” Wynn said. “I asked you—”

“But we should talk of it. Cousin, we must. You know I have seen it. So has Mr. Grey. Tell them.”

Everyone looked at Gideon, whose mouth tightened. “I don’t wish to speak of this, Miss Jessamine.”

“Tell them. Am I a liar? Is it just my imagination? Is it?”

“I really cannot discuss this,” Gideon said. The tension in his voice was audible.

“You mean, you can’t deny it,” Jessamine said. “Because you have seen it, and so have I, and Cousin Wynn, so have you.”

That got everyone looking at Wynn. His round, cheery face dropped a little. He didn’t reply for a moment, and then he let out a long sigh. “Yes. I have.”

“Oh, come, Wynn,” Bram said.

“Don’t.” Wynn held up a hand. “Don’t, please, tell me I was seeing things or accuse me of having too much imagination.

I am a grown man. I have lived in this house all my life.

I have seen one after another family member fall prey to despair, sinking into the silence of dread, and I know, too well, why that is. I know.”

He sounded frighteningly sincere. Zeb glanced around the table and said, “You saw what Jessamine described to us? A monk-like figure with a featureless face?”

“Zebedee!” Bram snapped.

“I don’t wish to—” Wynn broke off. “If you will have it, yes. Yes, I have, but this is not a subject for discussion. I don’t want to see it, or for any of you to see it. Although, in the circumstances…” He shook his head.

“What circumstances?” Dash said.

Wynn raised his eyes. “Guilt. Shame. Sin. That is what brings it, and once it is seen, retribution always follows.”

Dash’s lips parted. Elise’s cheekbones were red. Bram said, “Really, Wynn, this is—Well, it strikes me as rather poor taste.”

“Taste?” Jessamine demanded. “What has taste to do with anything? This is not a—a review, where you decide if something is worthy to exist or not! It is true!”

There was a ringing silence, which Zeb broke with, “No, it’s not.”

She turned on him, eyes bright with fury. Wynn said, “Zeb, I fear—”

“I’ve read the book.”

“What?” Bram said.

“This is literally The Monastery. Honestly, have none of you except Wynn read our grandfather?” A glance around the table answered that question.

“The protagonist of volume one is condemned to the monastery in male disguise by her husband and murdered by evil monks. Then the rest of the book is her ghost hounding all the various villains to their doom. She wears a monk’s robe and has an eyeless glare.

A joke’s a joke, but I have to agree, this is poor taste. ”

Jessamine was gaping at him. Elise’s lips curled maliciously upwards. Bram said, “Ha!”

Wynn was shaking his head. “You are right about the book.” He didn’t sound caught out or embarrassed in the slightest. “I quite see what you must have thought. But you have it the wrong way round, Zeb. I have not taken a ghost story from The Monastery. Walter Wyckham thought up The Monastery based on the ghost.”

Zeb just looked at him. Wynn gave a weary smile. “Consult the family records if you wish. It has been seen before, many times. My father’s death. Walter’s. Laura’s. Even poor Georgina. Truly, she died of her shame.”

“But,” Zeb said.

“I hope and pray none of you see it, but if you do, don’t look at its face. Turn away and you may, perhaps, be spared. Now, we will speak of this no further; no good will come of discussing it. I shall ring for the plates to be cleared. I believe there is chocolate pudding to come.”

***

Zeb staggered out after the meal to get some fresh air and met Hawley on the steps, with the inevitable cigarette. In the cold, his breath plumed smoke as much as Hawley’s exhalations.

“Ah, Zeb. Gasper?”

Zeb glanced warily at the cigarette case he offered. “Not if it’s those god-awful perfumed things. Where did you pick them up, a brothel?”

“Wynn’s filled his cigarette boxes with them. You get used to it.”

“Thanks, I won’t. Must you render every meal hideous by sniping at Bram and Elise?”

“Why should I not?”

“It’s a bit much to call a man a cuckold if it was you who cuckolded him.”

“On the contrary. I can be absolutely sure that my accusation is true.”

“Well, at least you ought to lay off Elise for committing adultery,” Zeb countered. “That’s damned hypocritical.”

“Why? I never made vows to Bram, and I never forced her to break the ones she made. She degraded herself of her own free will. Should I pretend otherwise?”

Zeb contemplated the dim oval of his face in the darkness.

“You know, Hawley, if you despise married women for having affairs with you, you should stop having affairs with married women. Just give it a rest, will you? I would like to get through the next couple of weeks with a minimum of unpleasantness, so if you could kindly avoid making every evening as awful as you made this one—”

“You expect me to sit silently while Elise manoeuvres? Watch her dangle London in front of Jessamine like a bribe? I think not, Zebby. Any more than I intend to watch you act out your performance of virtuous indifference. Oh, no, I will not marry for money, I’m too noble.

Give it all to Jessamine,” he mocked in a high-pitched whine that Zeb had to infer was an imitation of himself. “Absurd.”

“It’s not a performance. I don’t want any part of this medieval nonsense.”

“Oh, give it a rest. Have you another job yet?”

“What has that to do with it? No.”

“No,” Hawley repeated. “Sacked again, and that’s what, the third time in four years?

Can’t keep a job, not a penny to your name, and a house and a fortune waiting to be snapped up if you can bring yourself to tolerate cunny rather than cock for ten minutes.

But of course you don’t want the money, no indeed. Do you expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t care if you believe me, and my affairs are none of your business.”

“But they are,” Hawley said, puffing on his foul cigarette.

“They are very much my business if you intend to enrich yourself at my expense. Let me be blunt. I am having the girl, and the inheritance with her. If you make grounds with Jessamine, I will not hesitate to let her, and Wynn—and Bram, come to that—know exactly how you spend your leisure hours and who with. I doubt either Jessamine or Wynn’s favour will survive the information that you are one of London’s more dedicated sodomites.

Wouldn’t Bram feel vindicated then? Wouldn’t dear Elise make hay with it? ”

“Go to hell, Hawley,” Zeb said. “Be damned to you. You had absolutely no need to say that. What have I ever done to you?”

“Nothing at all, dear boy. I have no desire to reveal your sordid secrets to the world, and no quarrel with you other than the prospect of you getting in my way. But I really must oblige you to give up any thoughts of winning Jessamine or Lackaday House. No more manoeuvring, Zebby, or I will be forced to act.”

He puffed once more on his cigarette, tossed it away, a little orange shooting star in the darkness, and went back to the house without farewell. Zeb stood alone, his cheeks burning, needing the sting of cold.

He had always known Hawley was a shit. One could hardly fail to notice.

But he hadn’t particularly been a shit to Zeb before.

When their social circles overlapped, as occasionally happened, they’d nod at one another civilly enough, or exchange a few mildly barbed words and move on.

Zeb had come to regard that as a relationship in its way, just as one might get used to a snarling dog when you passed it every day, so that it came as a surprise when the cur finally went for your throat.

He stood outside, seething and miserable, until it was too cold to be tolerated and he had to retreat inside. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed ten as he came into the hall.

There were voices audible in the drawing room.

Zeb skirted it; he had no desire to speak to anyone present.

Not Bram or Elise; certainly not bloody Hawley; not Jessamine, whose friendliness he’d now have to repel if he didn’t want Hawley to carry out his threat.

Not the excessively military Dash; not Wynn, whose damn fool ideas had let him in for this ghastly event, and absolutely not Gideon, who hated him.

Sod the lot of them. He had brought The Riddle of the Sands and The Phoenix and the Carpet with him and was looking forward to both. An hour in bed with a book would be a great deal more pleasant than anything else on offer.

He headed up the stairs, noting that the light from the gas lamps was very low and flickering again.

He wasn’t quite groping his way along the corridors, but the dark red of the wallpaper, the dark wood of the floor covered by dark rugs, the dark rectangles of paintings, and the long, dark, windowless stretches of corridors made for an extremely uninviting journey.

It was exactly the sort of dimly lit empty maze in which one might see a ghost.

He turned the corner and saw a ghost.

There was an indistinct grey cowled shape at the far end of the corridor. The lights flickered again. It was extremely cold. There was a monk.

It turned to face him. Slowly, slowly, it lifted its hooded head, and under the hood he saw only darkness.

Zeb knew a terrified impulse to hide his face from it, but the emotion that actually seized control was anger. “Oi!” he shouted. “Who the sod are you?”

The monk turned and whisked around the corner, its robes swishing on the floor. Zeb sprinted after it, but he skidded on a loose rug that felt like it had been greased, losing his balance, and had to windmill his arms to right himself. He swore, turned the corner—

It wasn’t there.

Nobody was there. He hadn’t heard a door open or shut, but the corridor was empty, as if the monk had vanished in the few seconds it had taken him to catch up.

He looked around, baffled and annoyed. “All right, very funny. You can come out now.”

Silence. Absolute silence. He stood still, waiting for the giggle or the breath or the creak. None came.

Bastard. He marched down the corridor, trying all the doors on the left, then working his way back up. They all opened onto empty rooms. There was nobody here.

He could, he supposed, head back downstairs and make a fuss.

That was probably what they wanted him to do, whoever they were.

Wynn or Jessamine, he supposed—but no, that wasn’t right, he’d heard them both in the drawing room as he’d passed.

Bram couldn’t move that fast. Elise wouldn’t wear a cassock unless monasteries were hiring couturiers.

Hawley didn’t need to play ghost when he had a perfectly satisfactory game of blackmailer going on.

Gideon? Would Gideon really dress up in a cassock to scare him? Did he want Zeb to leave that badly, enough to do something so childish and unkind?

Zeb didn’t want to think about that. He took stock of his position, summarised it as utterly miserable, and went to bed.