It is very unpleasant to sit down to a meal when you are trying to determine which one of your breakfast companions is a murderer. I drank my tea and met no one’s eyes, while my thoughts raced and rattled about my skull.
Denton was the obvious choice. Denton was a doctor. He could not possibly have examined Maddy and not noticed the broken neck. But at the same time, as a doctor, he should have had a hundred and one ways to kill someone without resorting to such a crude method of murder.
Still, that was not enough to rule him out. Men panicked sometimes. Perhaps it had been a crime of passion, an unrequited lust for Madeline. I had seen no such indication, but men have hidden such things before. It had to be Denton.
Didn’t it?
But just when I had convinced myself thoroughly of Denton’s guilt, I would glance at Roderick out of the corner of my eye. If there was ever a man wracked by a guilty conscience, it was Roderick Usher. He startled at every sound, turning his head constantly as if expecting that someone was creeping up on him. One of the servants brought in more tea and he yelped and dropped his fork with a clatter. And there was the way he had reacted when I called him Lady Macbeth. Even if we ignored all that, surely he had helped to lay his sister out on the slab. Surely he would have noticed the broken neck.
No, the most logical answer was that they were both in on it, that whichever one of them had killed her, the other had helped to cover up.
Would Roderick really cover up his sister’s murder? And why murder her at all? She was nearly dead already. What possible gain could there be in hastening her death along?
I found that I could believe that Denton would cover for Roderick, but not that Roderick would cover for Denton. I had seen Usher under fire, in the trenches. I knew what sort of man he was. He had plenty of courage but little nerve, and he had loved his sister dearly. I could think of no hold that Denton might have over him that would cause him to cover such a thing. The doctor could hardly be blackmailing Usher, who had nothing worth taking any longer, and Usher’s sins, whatever they might be, were not the sort that would cause a man to stand by while his sister’s neck was snapped like a … like a …
Like a hare, I thought, seeing again the staring eye of the witch-hare. I jammed my fork into my eggs and the tines scraped across the plate. Roderick shrieked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, covering his face. “I’m sorry. It’s this damned problem with my nerves. I hear … I think I hear…”
“It’s all right,” I said automatically. I pushed back from the table, no longer hungry. “I think I’ll go for a ride.”
The weather had not cleared at all. It was still drizzling and the sky was turning an unpleasant shade of greenish gray. I was barely over the causeway when I saw movement in the grass and found a hare staring at me.
I cursed at it and spurred Hob. He didn’t deserve that and he bounced a few times to let me know that he knew he didn’t deserve that. I didn’t look over my shoulder but I could feel the hare behind me, like an enemy sentry watching to see if I strayed into disputed territory. I fancied that as soon as I was out of sight, it would go crawling along to alert the other hares to my presence.
Hares don’t do that, of course. Hares aren’t like rabbits, who actually post sentries around their warrens and alert each other to danger. Of course, with these accursed things, who knew anymore? Maybe I was right, and there was a disease. Maybe it was making the hares as paranoid as Roderick.
Something clicked inside my head. I was suddenly back in that sheep farmer’s hut on the mountain, listening to him rant about sheep diseases. “Th’ hydrophobia,” he’d allowed. “Aye, they get it. Not th’ same as dog, y’hear? Dog gets mean. Sheep gets stupid.”
Suppose there was a disease, and it had two forms. One like Madeline’s. But Roderick had also declined, hadn’t he? Fear. Acute sensitivity to sounds. Could those be symptoms, not of stress but of pathology?
Hob slowed. I looked up, pulled from my thoughts, and saw another hare at the edge of the road, sitting bolt upright. My horse gave it a wide berth and I didn’t try to rein him in. For a moment, I was half-afraid the thing might dart out and bite at Hob’s legs.
I saw two more of the hares before I made out a far more welcome silhouette, that of Miss Potter sitting on her little stool, umbrella deployed over her head, carefully dabbing at a painting of a mushroom. I was seized with a sudden fear for her, that the hares might be watching her as well. Watching her and preparing to … what? Bite? Attack? Spread their disease somehow?
Miss Potter bent over her easel, no doubt in contemplation of boletes or one of the other myriad fungi that infested Usher’s land.
Fungi.
A second click inside my head. Fungi. I jerked my head up. Not even the blaze of tinnitus that followed the movement could drown the thought. Fungi. Of course. The mold that coated the wallpaper and crept into the library books, the mushrooms that hunched themselves up from the earth, the affliction of Angus’s fish?
What had Miss Potter said, upon our first meeting? I do not know what you know of fungi, but this place is extraordinary … so many unusual forms.
Could it be a fungus, not a disease? Worse, one unique to this region? Was that why Denton could not identify it?
“You said there are fungi that infect living beings,” I said, sliding off Hob’s back. “You mentioned fish. What about humans?”
“Of course,” she said, as if we had been in midconversation and I had not just galloped up to her on horseback as if the Devil himself were on my tail. Hob, always pleased to have an audience, pretended that our great sliding halt had been his idea and pranced to show Miss Potter that she should be impressed. “Ringworm is a fungus. Thrush, which you find on infants, is caused by a yeast that is found on many species. There are others, though some are rare.”
“Are any deadly?” I led Hob closer. He rolled his eyes, clearly thinking that it was walk and run and stop and walk and his rider needed to make up kan damn mind.
Miss Potter tapped her finger against her lips. “Yes, though I don’t know that they are identified as such as often as they should be. People came back from India with little bumps that covered their face and neck, and that is believed to be a fungus. Men have died of it. And there are molds that form in houses that were strongly believed to contribute to miasma. Now, of course, we have germs, so miasma is no longer in vogue, but I cannot say that the mold could not have weakened a person’s lungs so that germs might take hold.” She shrugged eloquently. “In short, yes, I believe there are likely fungi that affect humans that are deadly. Certainly they kill fish. And there are the ones that hunt worms, which is not the same as infection, but—”
“Wait, what?” I held up a hand. “Did you say a fungus that hunts worms?”
“Oh yes. It caused quite a stir in the proceedings of the Society last year. A German named Zopf discovered a fungus that actively seeks out nematodes.”
It was a sign of how disordered my nerves had become that I did not derive nearly enough enjoyment from hearing Miss Potter pronounce the word “nematode” with an accent so British that it very nearly had its own stiff upper lip. I could only imagine packs of mushrooms leaping across the moors in pursuit of prey. It should have been funny. I told myself firmly that it was funny. “Hunt how?”
“Adhesive properties,” said Miss Potter. “They secrete a sticky net of hyphae, and once the worm is ensnared, the net cells germinate on the worm and extend a network through it, devouring it.”
“Does that kill it?”
“Eventually, yes.” Her eyes flicked away. I gathered that it was not a pleasant experience for the worm.
I licked my lips. “Hyphae?”
“Multicellular filaments. What differentiates a mold from a yeast, in essence.”
An idea was forming in the back of my mind. I didn’t like it one bit. “What do they look like, these hyphae?”
“They can take a number of different forms,” said Miss Potter. “But the most common one is white filaments.”
“Filaments.” I thought of Angus’s description of the fish. “Like slimy felt?”
“Felt, certainly, if it’s a thick enough mat.” She smiled tranquilly up at me. “But in small amounts, it would look like fine white hairs.”
“Lieutenant Easton, where are we going?”
“A crypt,” I said. “It’s … it’s very hard to explain. I just need you to look at something under a magnifying glass.”
“Is it a fungus?”
“It’s a dead woman’s hair.”
Miss Potter stopped in the middle of the hallway. I had hustled her into the manor, hopefully without alerting anyone, and was trying to get her down to the crypt. It would have been easier if she hadn’t kept stopping and demanding explanations.
“I must assume you refer to Miss Usher? Lieutenant, I have come to think of you as a sensible person, but there is something quite unsavory about all this.”
Unsavory seemed like such a dire understatement that I gave a bark of laughter. “I know. It’s utterly appalling. But, Miss Potter, I swear to you on my honor as a soldier—”
“I have,” she said, in blighting tones, “known far too many soldiers.”
I could not argue that. Frankly, I’d only said it because I thought it was the sort of thing that might appeal to an Englishwoman, pip-pip, cheerio, God save the Queen, and so forth. I placed my hand against the peeling wallpaper and took a deep breath.
“Miss Potter,” I said, “I swear to you on the graves of soldiers that I have buried with my own hands, I mean no harm to you or anyone in this house. But if I try to explain it, you will think me completely mad. It is easier to show you. And if you tell me that I am mistaken, then I will escort you back to town and make a clean breast of everything to the master of this house.”
Eugenia Potter looked at me with her small, bright eyes, then gave a single sharp nod. “Very well. ‘Lay on, Macduff!’”
My heart was in my throat that we would meet Denton or Usher or one of the servants on the way to the crypt, but that vast house worked in my favor for once. We saw no one. I led her through increasingly dim corridors, only to realize that I had no lamp or candle.
I swore softly in Gallacian. Miss Potter cocked a jaundiced eye at me. “I do not know what that word means, Lieutenant, but I have my suspicions.”
“Sorry, Miss Potter.”
“Mm. If you will hold my umbrella, I will provide a light.” She reached into her enormous bag and withdrew a small shuttered lantern. It was my turn to stare.
“Miss Potter! Is that a housebreaker’s lantern?”
“It is none of my affair what others may use such a design for,” she said primly. “The shutters are most useful for providing specific directional lighting when I have been working on a painting long enough that the sun has changed position.” She lit the candle inside the lantern and adjusted the shutters, then handed it to me.
“Madam,” I said fervently, “you are a wonder.”
“Hmmph!”
We navigated the stairs to the crypt with the aid of the lantern. I pulled the bar from the door and pushed it open. The light from the shuttered lantern fell upon the empty slab, the shroud lying forlornly on the floor, and nothing more.
Madeline was gone.