chapter 6

Though it is a bleak and tedious affair, I force myself to watch them every night. It can be wearing when all that sustains your existence is hatred and sometimes I feel so exhausted that my most ardent desire is not to see her eat and eat until her body is a barely recognisable wobbling mass of blubber but rather to depart this wretched world and leave behind all its hurts. But then i see the mouth of the man who I convinced myself I loved for years against the full, milky moons of her perfect breasts, I am once again filled with the hatred I need to be the malevolent ghoul that only desires her destruction.

He usually treats her as if the slightest touch could smash her to smithereens but tonight he is so different. He kisses her fiercely, biting down softly on her lower lip and pinning her to the bed by her delicate wrists. I can see her pulse quick as a bolting rabbit in her throat as he hungrily sinks his teeth into the soft, vulnerable flesh of her neck. He is a ravenous beast of lips, tongue and teeth as he makes a trail of wet kisses down to her breasts but just as he is about to tear at her dress Hamish begins to scream, loud and inconsolable from Hannah's bedroom.

"Damn that infernal racket!" He curses, rolling off her and slamming his fists into the mattress in impotent fury.


The next day Hannah and Lucy sit together in my library. Though she grimaces a little at the weight of the boy, Lucy dandles Charlie on her knee and reads to him from Through The Looking Glass, affecting silly voices for each of the characters. She seems to particularly enjoy the rhyme "How Doth The Little Crocodile" and reads it to the child twice:

"How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!"

When the child is distracted by one of the illustrations she shyly looks across the table at Hannah.

"I do wish you wouldn't quiz William so," she says.

"I might have gotten a little carried away," Hannah admits but there is little remorse in her voice.

"You must understand how it hurts me to see two of the people I love best not get along," Lucy insists.

"Yes, I suppose. He just seems so very different from all the values that father always tried to instil in us but if you love him and you are happy with him then he must be a good man," she looks at Lucy intently. "You are happy here, aren't you?"

The question seems to catch Lucy a little off guard and she draws in a sharp breath.

"I am happy with William though I regret that loving him has taken me far away from you and father and means I miss out on so much of Charlie and Hamish's lives but..." she leans in a little closer to Hannah as if afraid of being overheard. `'This house is so old and strange. I feel this creeping sensation on my skin as if I am being watched and, sometimes, when I am all alone I feel like there is something that means to do me harm."

I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. I have become so accustomed to thinking of her as the hapless victim in my villainous plot that it has never once occurred to me that she might suspect something is amiss.

She utters a little hollow laugh. "I am so stupid, I know it cannot really be. It is only the silly fancies of an idle mind."

Absurd images of charlatan spirit mediums coming to throw around holy water, bolt up crucifixes and exorcise me from the house vanish from my mind. This might be an era where seances are regarded as amusing middle class parlour tricks but it is also fond of locking away young ladies with overheated imaginations away in the madhouse. Of course she would not dare suspect that the house was haunted.

"Soon the season will begin and you will be so busy with balls and parties that it will seem like there aren't enough days in the week. You will have so many new friends that these lonely days will be but a distant memory," Hannah assures her.

"That is if I am not so fat and dull by that time that I am of no interest to anyone," Lucy says with a small sigh. "Honestly, I feel like all I ever do is eat and when I am not eating I think about food constantly."

"Nonsense, you look more beautiful than ever," Hannah says. "Mother always had such a trial trying to get you to eat anything, it's wonderful to see you looking so healthy."

"When you spoke of those poor wretches who have nothing last night I confess that all I could think of was gobbling down the food on my own plate. It's shameful."

Even as she says these words she absent mindedly reaches into a paper bag on the table and takes out a Parma Violet, those sweet little capsules that look so deceptively like medicine. She pops it into her mouth and the sweet bursts and fizzes in her mouth, releasing it's heavily perfumed flavour.

Before Hannah returns to Scotland she gives Lucy two gifts. The first is a silver pendant with a bird on one side and a cage on the other so that when the pendant spins it creates an optical illusion that the bird is being released from its cage. It is so clearly a dig at William that to call it "thinly veiled" would be crediting her with too much subtly.

"Isn't it wonderful, William?" Lucy says, her eyes wide with delight as she spins the pendant.

"A very thoughtful gift," William says through gritted teeth.

The second gift is several bars of Cadbury's milk chocolate to satisfy Lucy's sweet tooth but of course even chocolate must be tainted by one of Hannah's tedious Socialist lectures.

"Cadbury's are a wonderful company founded on Quaker values of fairness for all," Hannah explains. "And now they make chocolate bars just like they have in Switzerland and Belgium."

When Hannah departs William smiles broadly at Lucy. "Isn't it nice to have an empty house again. Just you and I?"

She nods but looks at the empty hall as if she is staring into some great and terrible void.