Page 12 of All of Us Murderers

Seven

He got up early again the next morning, tempting though it was to hide in bed for the rest of the fortnight.

“Face the day,” he told himself sourly. It was what Gideon had used to tell him as he got out of bed on time in the morning, brisk and ready for work.

Zeb had not been so inclined then, and didn’t want to now.

But here he was, and his desire to be outside just about outweighed his desire to stay in bed staring at the ceiling and feeling miserable, so he headed out for another turn around the grounds.

He felt rather too aware of the twelve-foot boundary wall as he walked, even though he mostly couldn’t see it.

If he was going to stay, he’d need to get out onto the moor and take advantage of the beautiful scenery and miles of land unpopulated by Wyckhams.

He was going to stay; he’d made a promise so he had to take the consequences.

But he hadn’t promised to allow himself to be made a fool of by people capering around in costumes.

He’d considered his situation thoroughly as he lay in bed last night, cold and angry and listening for noises that might be footsteps, and the conclusion he had reached was, Sod this for a game of tin soldiers.

He stomped around the follies, marched through the wood past Wayland’s Smithy, and was coming up to the stone circle in a bad mood he couldn’t shake when he saw a man approaching from the other direction. Tall, lean, looking as ill-tempered as Zeb felt: who else could it possibly be.

“Hey,” he snapped. “I want a word with you.”

“Mr. Zebedee?” Gideon said, with cold disdain.

His damn fool name on Gideon’s lips, and Zeb’s resentment and misery and anger boiled over with the abruptness of a pot of milk on the stove. “Fuck you.”

Gideon’s head went back. “Excuse me?”

“You heard. I don’t know what I have done to merit this treatment,” Zeb said.

“Well, I do, but for Christ’s sake, I didn’t do it on purpose.

I’m sorry I got you sacked; I got myself sacked too, so it’s not as though the whole thing was a spree for me.

I’m sorry I wasn’t who you wanted me to be a year ago, I’m extremely sorry my presence here upsets you now, and I’m sure we’d both prefer it if I was anywhere else, but I’m not.

And with all that said, I am sick to the back teeth of your insults and accusations and spite.

I don’t deserve it, I’m not going to put up with it any more, and, frankly, I thought better of you than childish practical jokes! ”

Gideon had looked like he was ready to fire back, but at that last his brows went up. “What do you mean, jokes?”

Zeb glowered up at him. “Capering around in a sheet to frighten people is pretty low stuff, and if you had read The Monastery you might grasp quite how poor the taste of this whole farrago is.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You, dressed up in a robe, prancing round the corridor last night when I went to bed!”

“I did no such thing. Robe?”

“Robe, hood, faceless monk of the kind you and Wynn and Jessamine have been making sinister allusions to. It’s embarrassing. You really can’t need a job that badly.”

“I need this job extremely badly,” Gideon bit out. “But my duties do not involve dressing up as the family ghost to scare you, and I didn’t.”

“Well, if it wasn’t you, who was it?”

“How should I know? When was this?”

“Just after ten.”

“I was playing billiards with your brother and Colonel Dash from quarter to ten until past the half hour,” Gideon said. “I had an eye on the clock, as anyone would in those circumstances. I didn’t leave the room for the duration of the game. Ask your brother.”

Bram had many poor qualities—most of them, really—but he wouldn’t collude on a practical joke, if only because of his inflated sense of personal dignity.

If Gideon had been playing billiards with Bram, he hadn’t been upstairs making a mock of Zeb, and Zeb felt a knot in his chest relax with a sudden lurch that made him realise just how tight it had been.

“Oh,” he said. “Right. Well—sorry. I thought I heard everyone else downstairs. Sorry.”

“Everyone else was downstairs. The only people missing were you and Hawley.”

“I don’t suppose it was him: he’d hardly need to bother playing ghosts in the circumstances. You should probably know he’s blackmailing me about being queer.”

“What?” Gideon yelped.

Zeb should probably have led up to that a bit more, he realised.

“He’s threatening to tell Wynn my sordid secrets if I don’t step out of the running for the inheritance, and since he won’t believe I’m not in the running, this is going to get nasty.

I don’t think he knows that you were the person I got sacked from Cubitt’s with—in fact, I’m sure he doesn’t, or he’d have taunted you about it. But I felt I should warn you.”

Gideon looked as though he was struggling to breathe. “I literally cannot lose this job. I can’t. If your damned cousin is going to tell Wynn everything—Mother of God, are you trying to ruin my life?”

“I didn’t ask him to blackmail me! For God’s sake, why would I want you to lose your job again? I still feel guilty about the last time!”

“Perhaps because you don’t want me here while you’re courting your cousin.”

“I am not courting my blasted cousin! I don’t want the Wyckham fortune at all, still less with Jessamine attached!”

“Of course not, why would you? When you’re unemployed again, and on your uppers—”

“I’m not on my uppers at all. I’m doing very well.”

“You don’t look like you’re doing well. You look like a tramp.”

“I have always looked like a tramp, employed or not,” Zeb pointed out. “I don’t want the damned money, I have said so repeatedly, and I don’t see why the idea is so hard to grasp!”

Gideon leaned back, face sceptical. “Because it’s a hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”

Zeb’s jaw actually dropped: he could feel himself gaping.

He closed it hastily. “How much? Good Lord. I had no idea. I knew he was rich but a hundred and fifty thousand? Really? Why the blazes doesn’t he redecorate the place?

I don’t know what one could do with Lackaday House short of knocking it down and starting again, but probably one of those interiors people would have ideas.

Or he could just live somewhere else. I’d live somewhere else. ”

“As you could,” Gideon said. “Anywhere you like, if you marry the girl.”

Zeb could feel the tug of it. A hundred and fifty thousand was an obscene sum. It was fur coat money, yacht money, Monte Carlo money. Money that would make your whole world a place of pleasure and ease. Money you’d do anything to have.

Obscene.

“It’s a lot, I grant you,” he said. “But as somebody, possibly Jesus, said, what does it profit a man if he gains a cartload of cash but loses his soul?”

“It profits him a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Many people would put their souls to one side for that.”

And Gideon thought Zeb was one of them. Hurt surged through him. “For God’s sake, Gideon. What did I ever do to make you think I’m greedy? Irresponsible, thoughtless, careless, I’ll admit all of that. But greedy? Really?”

Gideon opened his mouth, but whatever he might have said didn’t come. The silence stretched out for a few eternal seconds.

“No,” he said at last. “I would never have said you were greedy. I would never have thought you would stab anyone in the back for an inheritance, still less marry a schoolgirl for one. I can’t reconcile the man I knew with your presence here.”

“You could reconcile it very easily if you listened to me!” Zeb yelped. “I’m not doing those things!”

“But,” Gideon began, and stopped there with an arrested look.

Zeb tried to wait for him to speak, jamming his hands in his pockets in an effort to hold back, but the words bubbled out.

“Look, I’m sorry. I hate this. I wish we weren’t on these terms. I’m sorry I thought you did something horrible to me, and I wish you didn’t believe I’m doing horrible things now.

I can’t bear that we’re like this, actually. Would you walk?”

“Walk?”

“Walk and talk. Since we’re both stuck in this blasted house, maybe we could make things less bad if we talk to one another rather than shouting and storming off. If you want to make them less bad, of course. You might not. Up to you.”

Gideon looked slightly off-balance, maybe a little wary, but something had changed in his face. “Uh—we could walk.”

“Thank you. Can we go outside the grounds?”

“Not easily. The only exit is the front gate, which is kept locked.”

“No back door and the front gate always locked?” Zeb asked as they set off. “I dare say Walter Wyckham might have worried about his privacy when he built this damn fool place, or been half mad, whichever, but why does Wynn live like this?”

“I understand there was an incident a few years ago. An escaped convict made his way inside the walls and was in the grounds for five days before he was identified and caught.”

“You’re joking.” Zeb felt slightly dizzy, walking along with Gideon, having a conversation. It wasn’t a conversation about anything they needed to talk about, but it was still an exchange of words which they were both trying to make work, and that was something.

“Not at all. He hid in one of the follies and stole food from the kitchens during the day. He was caught when he attacked a maid.”

“Good God. How awful. I see why Wynn doesn’t want people wandering in unobserved, then, but it’s still rather prisonesque. Not to mention, in the middle of nowhere, a twelve-foot wall surely looks more like a temptation than a deterrent.”

“In what possible way?” Gideon demanded.

“If you’ve built a huge wall, there must be something behind it that’s worth the effort of scaling it. That’s what I’d think. If I were a burglar, of course.”