‘The green bottle,’ he spat.
‘What good is that to me! You know this!’ she shouted back.
‘The green bastard bottle, the one with the cork in it! For God’s sake!’ He stomped out of the room. Minutes later, the front door slammed.
Mrs Wiggs was once again left alone with me, shaking her head and muttering under her breath.
‘Very well,’ she said to herself. She picked up the green glass bottle on the dresser and set it down again next to me on my nightstand.
I waited until she’d left, then fetched my own drops from the drawer in the same nightstand. My own bottle, a brown glass one, was exactly the same as theirs, with a cork in it, only the colour was different. I knew that Thomas struggled with distinguishing between reds, greens and browns sometimes. And now I wondered whether Mrs Wiggs had the same problem.
I left the two bottles side by side and waited for her to come back. When she returned and spotted them next to each other, she stopped, her confused eyes darted from one to the other.
‘What is this?’ she asked.
‘I had my own bottle. I wanted to see how similar it was, that’s all. It’s the green one, he said. Mine is brown.’
She hesitated. As hard as she looked, she could not tell the difference. That was the proof I needed. Mrs Wiggs was colour-blind, just like Thomas. Colour-blindness, I had learned at the hospital, was an inherited condition, passed along the maternal line, as it had been in this instance too, from mother to son. I had no understanding of how, but the science spoke for itself.
‘He’s your son, isn’t he?’ I said. I had butterflies in my stomach and only dared to whisper it.
Mrs Wiggs’ mouth hung open at words which, I guessed, had never before been said aloud.
‘What are you gibbering about? You are a lunatic, nothing but a sick lunatic. You don’t know anything!’
‘Thomas is colour-blind too. You’re his mother, aren’t you? You are both tall, you have the same hairline, practically the same ears, you stroked his face on the stairs, and now you call him “Thomas”. When you pushed me down the stairs, it was because you didn’t want a child dragged into this mess, not now, not your own grandchild born in an asylum. Was that why? I don’t know how, but you are his mother. I know it, and so will a doctor. What will you do if someone should put this to the test?’
She glared at the bottles, unsure of how they had betrayed her. To me it made perfect sense – all her adoration and fawning, the unnatural closeness between them – but then something else struck me, something I hadn’t even considered.
‘What happened to the real Lancaster boy? What happened? You didn’t kill him, did you? You killed him! Oh my God. You murdered a child and replaced him with your own.’
‘Shut up!’ She had both balled fists up by her temples and her eyes were screwed up as if she couldn’t stand to hear anything I was saying.
‘Let me go!’ I said. ‘Let me go now, this minute, and I won’t tell a soul.’
She flew at me from across the room, her arms flailing, her voice wailing. She started to beat me about the head and face. I tried to protect myself with my arms over my head, my head down. She kept on screaming and pummelling me.
‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’ she shrieked, over and over again.
‘You are bruising me again!’ I shouted. ‘What will your son say when he sees!’
At that, she stopped, as abruptly as she’d started. Her eyes were vicious and round, her chest was rising and falling at pace, and her shaking hands were clenched by her side. I thought she was going to kill me; instead, she hastened out of the room and locked me in again.
*
If Thomas were to discover that I knew the truth, the sordid details of his own background, his fabricated family history, I would never get out of that house alive, I was sure of it. I lay in bed and turned over the new information in my mind. All those years he’d been a cuckoo in the Lancaster house. He was no better than me – no wonder we found each other. We did fit, after all.
I needed to act. I went over to the door, hoping for inspiration, some way to make my escape. The keyhole was blocked; Mrs Wiggs had left the key inside the lock. When I put my little finger in it, I could feel the metal stump.
I had to find a way to get to Reading. I needed to talk to my solicitor, not the police, who would only speak to my husband, and it would be my word against his. My solicitor could help me to raise hellfire at the Lancaster estate; he could send a letter to Helen, telling her what I knew for certain and promising that I would share my explosive information with the world. The threat of such a scandal, along with all the other details I had learned, would surely call Thomas off. Even if nothing came of it, it might be enough to keep him away from me. I knew that even if he convinced Dr Shivershev to sign the lunacy order, the order would only last for seven days. I only had to get out of the house and hide until the order expired.
Having Dr Shivershev in my head put me in mind of his housekeeper and the trick she’d used to break into his office. Might that work for me too?
I dressed, slipped a silk scarf under the door, took a rolled-up piece of paper, poked it into the keyhole
