CHAPTER 23

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

Lucy Harker lay in bed and listened to the dark.

Earlier she had stood over a basin while Cook washed her hair with a solution of rosemary water and borax. She had then been given a scrubbing brush and a bar of Castile soap and allowed to enjoy the luxury of a long hot soak in a high-backed copper bath, on the strict understanding that if left to herself she would use both brush and soap with vigour. She had dried herself behind a screen in front of a fire, and had been given a cotton nightdress so sharply ironed that it snapped and crackled as Cook shook out the folds and held it out for her.

The linen sheets above and beneath her were so white and crisp and smooth, and tucked in so tightly that she felt like a flower pressed between the pages of a heavy book. She stretched her feet to the edge of the bed, enjoying the cool feel of virgin sheets beyond the area already warmed by her body.

She had, she decided, never felt so clean.

Not on the outside.

On the inside where her thoughts and her memories lived she didn’t feel clean at all, and that was why she couldn’t get to sleep.

The knowledge that she was going to do something bad spread through her like a stain. She didn’t know exactly what the bad was, or why she was going to do it, but the inevitability of it loomed over her as if the future was impossibly casting a shadow backwards onto the present. She tried to banish this feeling of impending doom by thinking of her past, but that didn’t help much because there weren’t that many happy memories lurking back there and, more importantly, she had recently found the past had alarming holes in it, bits where her recollection just seemed to run out of road and hit a blank drop-off.

Those blanks frightened her almost as much as the certainty of the unknown badness she was about to do. She felt her heart beginning to trip-hammer with panic, and tried to slow it down by joining up what she could remember of her life into an orderly chain: she remembered being very little in the big city in France, in a tall pale house with blue shutters which folded around a courtyard garden with a big tree in the middle of it. She remembered her mother, and sitting in her lap in the shade beneath the generous green spread of leaves, and she remembered watching herself hanging upside down from a low branch and sticking her tongue out at herself, which was strange and maybe a dream memory, because the herself who stuck the tongue out had shorter hair than she did, and how could she be sticking her tongue out at herself anyway since being in two places at one time wasn’t possible?

She did remember her mother’s hands, always busy, sewing or making as she sang to her or told her stories. They were strong, nimble hands, and the smallest finger on the right hand was missing the top joint. Whenever she had asked about it her mother had said a little bird had taken it one day when she wasn’t looking, and when Lucy asked if it had hurt she had shaken her head and smiled and said no, and anyway the bird must have needed it more than she did, so she mustn’t mind at all.

Lucy remembered the finger and the smile, and the smell and the warmth of her mother’s body, but she couldn’t quite remember her face, not all of it at one time. When she tried to put the bits she could remember together to make a complete face, when she tried to join the crinkle at the edge of her eye with the freckles across her cheek and the smile and the hair, it never made a whole person, not sharp and distinct: the smile seemed to blaze out and blur things, so that it was like trying to look at a street-lamp through a haze of rain. And the last time she had seen her mother, it had indeed been raining, the cobbles wet and slippery beneath Lucy’s bare feet, giving no purchase or chance of stopping herself as she was dragged away and lifted into the back of a closed carriage, and her very last glimpse before the door slammed shut was doubly blurred by rain and tears as she saw her mother on the steps of the house with the blue shutters, arm outstretched towards her as two men in darker blue dragged her back into the black mouth of the hallway.

That hallway not only swallowed her mother, it seemed to have devoured a large portion of her past because it left an almost perfectly blank hole in her memory after that, but it didn’t trouble her because instead of falling into it, she fell asleep instead, and now that she was no longer listening to it, the darkness that filled the house listened back…