A persistent drip awoke Louise from her sleep. Beneath her head was a hard, cold slab that sent twinges of discomfort down her neck.
She was in the cave.
She started up with a cry, groping for her spectacles. What time was it? Impossible to tell from the weak light in the hut. She might have been out for hours. She could not believe herself. Had she really slept while the men suffered outside?
That was not all that she had done.
She turned to look at Harry. He slumbered on, his back to her. She had a sudden memory of his skin moving against hers, and shivered.
A moment of madness. Desperation. Yet she felt more ashamed of deserting the men and Papa, even for a short time, than of taking comfort in his arms.
She thought that she would feel altered, afterwards, but there was no difference. No difference in the least. She brushed down her skirts and climbed to her feet with a wince. All the value that was put upon virtue and there was so little to the act. Now she knew.
Faintly, from beyond the walls of the cave, came the slap of water against rock. It sounded playful, but that was a deceit. The cliff face suffered; that was why it looked so stern. Wave after wave, blow after blow, relentless, interminable. The sea gradually ate away at the cliff’s defences, the same way misfortune was chipping away at her own.
One of the men spluttered.
They needed help. She reached out to Harry, shook his shoulder to wake him.
Something was wrong.
She snatched back her fingers. Their sensations, their feel for temperature must be at fault. They must.
Holding her breath, she touched him again. He did not feel like flesh. His shoulder was icy and solid.
She pulled at him and he rolled over, a dead weight. Glazed blue eyes stared beyond her. The lips, which she had so lately kissed, were no longer red, but grey and lifeless.
It could not be. It could not possibly be.
‘Harry,’ she said.
She did not expect a reply. Yet still she kept shaking him, saying his name.
‘Harry!’
He was the one patient able to function. The healthiest. He had shown no signs of decline.
‘My God,’ she gasped, realising. ‘I killed you.’
Jerkily, she pulled on her cloak and stumbled towards the door. Her body felt numb, would not listen to her commands. What had she been thinking? In a moment of selfish weakness she had seen him as a man, not an invalid; she had overtaxed him and now . . .
The other men’s coughs hit her. She swayed slightly, watching them writhe and twist. All alive. How could they be alive when Harry . . .
She had not heard him die. She had been right there, and she had not even woken up. He must have passed without a sound. Not like Mama, not like Kitty . . .
‘Oh God.’ Her knees went slack again, as if someone had cut the tendons behind them, and this time there was no Harry to hold her up. She grabbed at the wall of the cave, scratching her hands. ‘Papa.’
Until that moment she had thought only of her own loss. But these men were dying. Harry was already dead. Her father’s experiment was utterly doomed and she would have to convey the message. He would hear the death sentence of his career from her own lips.
Somehow she persuaded her legs to walk. She had lost her slippers. Scattered pebbles on the beach pressed into the soles of her feet, but that seemed too trivial a thing to concern her. Fresh air blew cold against her face and she realised it was damp with tears.
She had never been one to despair before, but as she reached Morvoren House, she was aware of being broken at last. For a moment she paused outside the door, trying to catch her breath.
It swung open.
Papa stood there in his nightshirt. He had pulled breeches over it without properly fastening the buttons. His legs were stockingless, his feet bare.
‘They kept me from my duties,’ he raved. ‘Drugged me with something . . . Where are the men, Louisa, where are the men?’
‘Louise.’ Her mouth could barely form the name. ‘I am Louise.’
When she left, he had been paddling in the waters of the fever. Now he was fully submerged.
He reached for her chin, pulled it up and stared into her face. His fingers gripped her with surprising strength. ‘Louise,’ he repeated. ‘Louise . . . But she did not . . .’
She must not let him push past her. If he reached the cave and saw Harry . . .
She had meant to tell him the truth, but she could not, not while he was like this. She must protect him from it. Even if she had to write to another physician for help with the men, she would spare him her own painful knowledge.
She put out an arm to block his passage. ‘Creeda!’ she shouted. ‘Gerren!’
They emerged from the west wing.
‘Why was he left unattended?’ Louise demanded.
‘I am well,’ Papa interjected, ‘I am perfectly well, I must just—’
‘Didn’t expect him to wake,’ Creeda confessed. ‘Gave him that much laudanum . . .’
Pompey hurtled down the stairs, attracted by the sound of voices. Papa recoiled.
‘Get him away. Get the cur away!’
Nothing born of delirium should surprise her, but this did. Papa adored Pompey. She had never thought to see him cringing from the dog’s advances.
‘Gerren, take Pompey to my room.’
‘But ee said—’
‘Do it, Gerren.’
Louise could feel them slipping: the men, Papa, the servants; each one a rock tumbling from the cliff. Why was everyone so useless? Why would no one help her?
‘Please, Creeda,’ she said desperately. ‘I must get him to his room. Help me move him.’
‘The men . . .’ Papa objected.
Little did he know that one of them lay dead, somewhere below his feet. Presumably, there would be no family to claim poor Harry’s body. The gaol would not pay the expense of burial.
What was she going to do?
Somehow, they heaved Papa up the stairs and back into bed. He was still talking, talking all the while about lights and trades, and heaven knew what else. Louise seized the laudanum bottle from the medicine chest and administered two more drops to his moving lips.
Gradually, his eyelids wavered and fell. The breath rumbled in his chest. She stood watching him, conscious of the time and of his life slipping away.
She wished it were her instead.
‘Creeda,’ she whispered, needing to say the words. ‘Creeda . . . Harry is dead.’
Papa’s face twitched. But surely he could not have heard her?
‘Dead,’ Creeda echoed. She sounded as if she did not quite believe it. ‘Is he, miss?’
‘It was me.’ She closed her eyes. ‘My fault. I made him . . . I pushed him too far. I killed him.’
Something warm settled on her shoulder. Creeda’s hand. ‘No, miss. That can’t be true. You said he was getting better.’
‘He was! I thought . . .’
Forgetting herself, she turned to the maid and sobbed into her arms.
‘Who do I report it to? What shall I do with the body? I do not—’
‘I’ll send Gerren to town,’ Creeda soothed. ‘The man was a convict, wasn’t he, miss? I’m sure they won’t take much bother about him. The number of poor folk who die every day . . .’
Creeda’s gown smelt of rosemary. There was something comforting in that herbal scent, something redolent of her mother. ‘But the body . . .’
Creeda drew a breath. ‘You leave that to me. I know what to do.’
The solace in those words. She hungered to believe them.
‘Only . . .’ Creeda’s fingers tightened on her back. ‘Miss, are you really sure he’s dead? The experiment has failed?’
Louise could not erase the image of Harry lying there on a cold slab of rock, his sightless eyes fixed beyond her. Blue eyes. Had they not once been green?
‘I am certain he is dead, Creeda.’
‘Not . . . changed?’
She did not know whether to laugh or cry. In the midst of all this disaster, Creeda was Creeda still.
‘No, Creeda.’ She withdrew herself from the maid’s arms. ‘You never saw Harry, did you? He was . . . just a man. A good man.’
Creeda pressed her lips together. ‘If the men die . . . you and the master will be leaving us. Going back to Bristol.’
Fresh tears slid down her cheeks. They could never return to Bristol. But how could they remain here, living in the grave of all their hopes?
‘It is too early to consider that. I can plan nothing until Papa is well again.’
Creeda’s eyes ranged over Papa, tossing and turning in the bed. ‘The master isn’t himself. What if he decides to send me back to Plymouth?’
Louise lowered her head into her hands, trying to clutch everything together. She had always prided herself on her courage and sense. It was as though she had spent a lifetime being calm, just waiting for today. Knowing that nothing she endured would be truly worth panicking about, until this.
‘I told you, Creeda, I cannot think of it now. Leave us, please. Just leave us and . . . tell Gerren to set out at once. We need doctors. Anyone who can come. I cannot leave those men alone in the caves.’
Was that a tear Louise saw gleaming in Creeda’s brown eye? She did not look eerie now. Just a girl, petulant in her fear of being returned home to . . . whatever treatment Mr Nancarrow deemed necessary.
‘It’s the caves you should have left alone in the first place,’ Creeda muttered bitterly. She slammed the door behind her.
For the first time, Louise had to admit that Creeda was right.