Page 5 of All of Us Murderers

And, come to that, no wonder he was afraid of Zeb costing him another job.

It would only take one indiscretion, one foolish incriminating remark, and Zeb knew damned well he could be indiscreet.

He blurted things out without thinking, acted without consideration.

He’d spoiled everything that way. He didn’t want to do it again.

Zeb walked on, thinking about Gideon, and the anger in his voice, and of his face the evening before Zeb ruined his life. He thought about that last for some time, and then he reached a decision.

He couldn’t stay here, being reminded daily of what he’d thrown away, knowing the man he’d loved hated him, and constantly fretting that he might do something bloody stupid, which always seemed more likely to happen if he worried about it.

So he was going to leave. And if that showed Gideon that he wasn’t interested in the inheritance, and he realised Zeb was truly sorry for the harm he’d done, then he’d probably feel extremely bad about what he’d said, which would serve him right.

So Zeb would go and talk to Wynn right away and let him know. But after breakfast, because he was starving.

He headed back to the house on that determination, made an excellent breakfast—the eggs and sausages were probably local and put London to shame—and went to find his cousin.

That wasn’t entirely easy. The resentful footman, the only servant he managed to track down, denied all knowledge of his master’s whereabouts. Zeb wandered the ground floor, hoping not to encounter any of his other relatives, and eventually found himself in a library.

It was double height, with a spiral stair up to a balcony that ran around the entire room.

The ceiling was painted dark blue and dotted with what looked like accurate constellations to his inexpert eye; the chairs were all deep and upholstered with dark green leather that looked blissfully comfortable; the oak shelves were laden with books.

Zeb turned on the spot till he felt dizzy.

He was a bookworm of the worst kind, entirely capable of losing himself in a book while gongs sounded, bells rang, and people bellowed his name.

His father had used to demand why he couldn’t apply himself like that to his schoolwork, which Zeb had always felt missed the point to a baffling degree.

There was nothing like an absorbing book; this was a room made for them, and it could be all his if he married Jessamine and inherited the house.

For a moment, that actually seemed like a reasonable course of action.

There was only one painting in the room, since most of the wall space was far more usefully occupied with bookshelves.

It was a portrait of a man, with a face that Zeb recognised from the frontispiece engraving of several editions, not to mention the picture hanging in his room. It was his grandfather.

Walter Wyckham was portrayed at his desk, with a manuscript in front of him and a globe to one side, turned to display the West Indies.

He looked about seventy, bald like Wynn with a fringe of white hair round the sides, his face clean-shaven.

He wore a smile that might have been intended to give him a look of benevolence, but Zeb couldn’t see it that way.

He saw insatiable hunger in the twinkling little eyes, malicious pleasure in the curve of the lips, cruelty in the curved fingers that clutched the quill.

If Zeb were to inherit this house, he’d burn this picture before he so much as unpacked.

He plunged into an examination of the shelves rather than contemplate his grandfather further, and saw with a thrill that they held real books, not ones bought by the yard.

There were plenty of reference works and histories and whatnot, but it was mostly novels.

So many novels. All of Dickens, all of Trollope, all of Collins and Eliot and Mrs. Braddon and G.W.M.

Reynolds, and that led him on to a remarkable selection of bound penny dreadfuls, and then a magnificent array of Gothic novels.

Multiple editions of Walter Wyckham, of course.

Mrs. Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Clara Reeve, The Monk, Melmoth.

A copy of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto that proved to be an autographed first edition: he held it with reverent care in case the pages somehow fell apart in his hands.

There was even an entire section of William Beckford, which was impressive because Zeb had thought the man had only written one book.

The shelves held copies of Vathek in French and English, plus a couple of satirical novels that looked rather deadly, travel memoirs and letters ditto, and an album full of sketches and images of Beckford’s great, doomed edifice, Fonthill Abbey.

He took that last carefully to the desk and leafed through it with fascination.

“Hello?” A hand waved between him and the page.

Zeb blinked. He’d been deeply absorbed, and it took him a disconcerting moment to pull his thoughts from spires and echoing halls and Mr. Beckford’s nightmare-dream, and fully register that there was someone next to him.

“Hello,” the voice said again. It was light, female, unfamiliar. “Goodness, you were concentrating, weren’t you? What are you doing?”

Zeb looked up and saw the young lady who had run from the house in her shift last night.

She looked decidedly more respectable now, with her dark hair pinned up and a proper dress on, albeit one that looked to Zeb rather like a schoolgirl’s frock.

He was no aficionado of women’s fashions, though, and she was very pretty despite the dress: nothing like Elise’s cool elegant beauty, but she had a heart-shaped face, a charming smile, and sparkling eyes.

He couldn’t see much Wyckham in her features, but that could only be a good thing.

She looked like the heroine, Zeb thought, and smiled back.

“You must be my cousin Jessamine. I’m Zeb. Zeb Wyckham. Well, obviously Wyckham, we all are, aren’t we, except Dash. Although his name is Wyckham Dash, isn’t it, so he’s definitely—anyway, good morning.”

“Good morning!” She clasped her hands together and looked at him with big eyes. “I’m very happy to meet you. I’m not precisely your cousin, you know.”

“Well, you’re some number removed, but I was never much good at mathematics,” Zeb said, eliciting a peal of laughter. “I’d be honoured to be your Cousin Zeb, if you’d care for that.”

“I would like it very much, Cousin Zeb. Is it never Zebedee?”

“Never. Is it always Jessamine?”

“Always,” she said, mimicking his firm tone, and they exchanged smiles. This was already the most pleasant interaction he’d ever had with a relative.

“But what are you doing?” she asked, looking at the desk. “Is that a building plan? Are you an architect?”

“It is a plan, but not mine. I was just taking a look around Cousin Wynn’s shelves and came across this.

It’s all sorts of pictures of Fonthill Abbey.

That was a magnificent house built by William Beckford, who was a terribly rich man.

” He was talking to her as if she were a child, he realised, and he wasn’t sure why, except his own ineptitude with women.

Well, that and her expression of saucer-eyed interest, which made her look very young indeed.

“Beckford wrote a Gothic novel, Vathek. I don’t know if you’ve read it? ”

She shook her head. “Novels like Great-grandfather’s?”

“Like Walter Wyckham, yes, though Beckford only wrote the one. This was Fonthill.” He leafed back to the famous print of Beckford’s magnificent, selfish fantasy in stone.

“Oh.” She clasped her hands again. “How utterly beautiful. But how haunting. And that picture, as though it was drawn in a storm. It looks like a place where terrible things were done.”

Define ‘terrible’, Zeb thought, since rumour had it Beckford had harboured a harem of attractive young men in his Wiltshire isolation.

That sounded like fun, at least for Mr. Beckford.

Probably less so for the harem. “Well, he was a very odd fellow. According to a note in here, he only ever had guests to dinner once in the whole time he lived there, and that was a party made up of Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and Sir William Hamilton. That must have been awkward.”

“Must it?” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t know them.”

Wynn had said he’d tried to give the girl a sheltered upbringing.

If she hadn’t heard of the complicated private life of England’s Hero, he’d clearly succeeded.

Not that Zeb could see the point of sheltering a girl from talk of mistresses and adultery, and then introducing her to Hawley, Bram, and Elise, but here they were.

“I don’t suppose he had much time for parties,” he said. “Fonthill fell down shortly after it was finished.”

“Oh. Is it a ruin now? I love ruins. The ancient sadness of them—the knowledge one is treading through history. To imagine the medieval monks at their prayers, in their splendid isolation—”

“There weren’t any monks at Fonthill, and it wasn’t medieval,” Zeb pointed out. “It was just a pastiche, like this place. I do think the Georgian obsession with faked Gothic architecture—”

“This house is not faked!”

“Well, no, it’s a real house, and a very impressive one of its kind, I didn’t mean otherwise. Just rather newer than its architecture suggests.”

“It is not faked,” Jessamine repeated, ignoring his efforts. “And it isn’t new!”

“Well, it depends how you look at the matter,” Zeb tried. “I realise it’s more than a century old. I only meant that it’s not as old as it appears.”

“The land is old.”

“Well, yes, Dartmoor—”

“The site of the house,” Jessamine said. “Walter Wyckham built Lackaday House on the site of a monastery that was torn down.”

“Oh, really? Was that in the Reformation?”

“It was razed to the ground because of the corruption of the monks.”

“Well, that was the point of the Reformation.”

“I mean, it was a place of great cruelty,” Jessamine said. “Cruelty and secrets, presided over by evil men, until the people of Dartmoor tore it down because no such acts of darkness should be concealed in a house of God.”

“Gosh,” Zeb said, nonplussed by the sharp left turn into melodrama. “Odd site to pick for a house, then. Or not for Walter, I suppose. Actually, this sounds awfully like The Monastery. Dark deeds in the cloisters.”

“Like—?”

“The Monastery, by Walter Wyckham. You’ve not read our grandfather’s books?”

“No, none. There is one about a monastery? Oh, I must read it!” Jessamine clasped her hands enthusiastically. “Is it here?”

“There’s a shelf of Walter Wyckham books, but I’m not sure I’d start with that one. It’s a bit, uh—it caused something of a scandal at the time. Well, quite a large scandal. Actually, he never published another book, and became a social pariah.”

“Really? Why?”

The Monastery was Walter Wyckham’s last and oddest work, written against the current of his increasingly proper era.

It was stuffed with torture, distorted religion, and sexual depravity thinly veiled by the kind of allusion that made it, if anything, more disturbing.

Zeb was bang alongside sexual depravity in his reading matter as a rule, but The Monastery felt like an unpleasant intimacy with an unpleasant mind.

He classified it (from experience) as the kind of book that led one to toss oneself off to heated imaginings and feel thoroughly ashamed afterwards.

“It’s honestly rather nasty,” he said. “And awfully long too. He wrote better ones. I’d try Clara Lackaday first to see if you like his style.

That’s his first, with a heroine trapped in a great walled Gothic house, and terrible things happen.

Or Coldstone Abbey. That one has a marvellous villain, a sinister secretary who secretly orchestrates a lot of murders.

” He gave a moment’s thought to Gideon last night, his face cadaverous in the gaslight, and had to repress a grin.

“Or there’s The Stone Circle, about a pack of druids killing people. They’re all quite terrifying.”

“I like the sound of The Monastery.” Jessamine looked determined. Oh well, it would do her no harm. If she was as ignorant as she seemed, the dubious parts would go over her head; if not, the book wasn’t the issue.

“Just don’t read them before bed or you’ll have nightmares,” Zeb said. “The Stone Circle scared the absolute daylights out of me, and there’s a scene with spiders in Coldstone Abbey that gives me the horrors even to think of.”

“Spiders?”

“Don’t talk to me about spiders,” Zeb said wholeheartedly. He hated and feared the things with a passion that was frankly embarrassing in a grown man. One of Gideon’s most marvellous traits had been the nonchalance with which he’d removed the creeping horrors—

Gideon. Zeb was supposed to be leaving because of Gideon, not reading about Beckford or chatting to cousins.

He stood before he could get distracted again.

“I’m very pleased to have made your acquaintance, Jessamine, but I was actually looking for Wynn before I came in here. Could you point me in his direction?”