Clovis leans over Rafe and takes a piece of bacon draining on a kitchen towel. She places her hand on his shoulder.
‘Good morning, darling.’
He cannot help but flinch at her touch.
‘My, aren’t we jumpy this morning.’ She chews and studies Rafe.
‘Didn’t sleep well.’ He doesn’t meet her gaze.
Hmm.’
Clovis pauses before she leaves them and then climbs the stairs. They hear the thud of her door closing. Rafe scrambles eggs and glances over at Finn whose eyes are glued to his paper.
Willa leaves her breakfast untouched, takes her coffee to her room and climbs into bed with a sketchpad. She guides her pencil and wonders that Clovis didn’t silence her long ago. She knows more of Clovis’s secrets than anyone. And now she is certain of two more: as deadly and horrific as they can be.
Her pencil moves down the paper and the outline of a young girl’s face appears. What was her name? Mary. That was it. Mary at the asylum. Later, she will outline her face with stitches. Long-threading she calls it. Portraits of all the women in her long life, sewn in remembrance. A parentation. Willa knows what she must do. It will be hard, but she will do it because they must avenge. If they do nothing else with their interminable lives, they must avenge their dead.
She sets her sketchpad down and retrieves a volume from her bedside table. Curious that Dr Johnson’s dictionary does not seem to include the entry of such an old word, such an ancient, evil deed. She runs her finger down the page. Ah. There it is:
We’re going to avenge these appalling acts of mtró, mordre, morðor, murdrum, myrdrian, murder.
LONDON
PRESENT DAY
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The skeletons of London are rising. The magnificent city is fitful as machinery peels back the pavements. Layers of soil thirty feet high are crammed rich with the dead. Centuries of forgotten graveyards and emergency burial grounds, representing the whole spectrum of society when death spread like a conflagration, are being disturbed in their overgrown, crowded loneliness. There are digs that are more haunting than others. An axe is found in a woman’s skull, and a two-thousand-year old cooking pot with the lid still intact is filled to the top with remains.
Despite the attack on concrete, no archaeological site in London is as big and visible as the Thames foreshore when the tide is out. The relentless action of the tides has for thousands of years proven that sometimes, a thing lost might be found.
Autumn has pushed aside summer this year, with early gusts and an overcast sky that threatens winter storms ahead. Yawning nature, weary from bloom and bursts of growth, prepares for the last note of its nocturne.
It is past lunchtime when Constance stands in Narrow Street. The renaming of the street amuses her; it was much narrower when it was Fore Street. How small the houses seem; the rooms felt enormous when they were children. Constance’s spirits lift to see the terrace exquisitely restored. Fast and furious memories flood her and she turns away before she is completely overtaken on what may well be her last visit to this street.
As the afternoon loses its warmth she makes for the tranquil cobblestoned streets of Wapping. Her cape flaps with each breeze as she strides past a mammoth tourist coach. Its long, wide body looks like a threatening alien on the slim, ancient street. Tourists queue at the door of a heavily visited riverside pub. While they pile in, eager for their authentic experience, Constance descends a set of algae-covered wooden steps to the foreshore. The river, swift and grey in the dying afternoon, laps and roars.
Ominous bits of jagged glass, crockery and rusty iron lie at her feet. The spoils are never the same twice; the next time the river retreats it will deposit different offerings. Constance is here to visit the river, not its swag. It may be the last time she ever sees it, too.
The sisters were given long life and now they must make an offering, perhaps a sacrifice. If they fail, and are unable to return, Constance wishes for something of herself to remain. What better recipient of her memento mori than the river that has defined their lives. She removes a red-velvet pouch from her bag from which she withdraws a gold locket. An eighteenth-birthday gift from Verity, it contains two locks of hair, one from each of them. It is no use offering a gift that does not strike deep chords. She steps closer to the water’s edge and tosses it in.
Navigating the flotsam and jetsam, just as she turns her back to the river towards the stairs, her gaze falls on a tarnished, golden object. Is it the locket I just cast? she asks herself, disorientated. Has Father Thames spat it back at me? Her fingers join the grit and pebbles, animal bones and wrappers, to rescue the locket. Only when she wipes it clean does she see the shamrock engraved on the casing. Fascinated, she stops to prise it open. She reads it once, shakes her head, reads it thrice.
Grá buan
Averil & Francis
Love forever
Constance drops to her knees on the foreshore’s unkind surface. Her first thought is of Verity who will think this treasure is God’s miracle. Constance would disagree. The miracle is time.
‘Passports.’
‘Check, such as they are.’
‘Empty plastic travel bottles.’
‘Check.’
‘Pouches.’
‘Pouches?’
‘For the phials and bottles.’
‘I forgot.’
‘Oh, Verity.’
‘I’m nervous. I can’t think.’
‘Run to the market and buy those Chinese-silk pouches. Purchase several, we’ll place other things in them as well so that it seems like we’re women with travel phobias.’
‘Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about, travel phobias.’
‘Oh, just do it please.’
It’s been a week of sleepless nights since Constance found their mother’s locket. An urgent and most distressing request from Benedikt arrived in their safety letterbox two weeks ago. There has been some relief from the crisis that has hovered over them for two
