I CRINGED AND prepared to slide out – on the opposite side I decided so that he could not kick at me or stand on my fingers, like Shillidge the pigman had when he failed to see me making daisy chains on the lawn.
Never trust a woman, Ruby advised, except for me and Agnust and Hettie Granger and yourself, sometimes. In fact…
‘Can you not see him?’ Dolores interrupted.
Rudely, Ruby added.
‘There is nobody here,’ Wormwood replied.
‘Oh but there is,’ she insisted and her voice rose. ‘He is standing beside you.’
The bed creaked and sagged some more, pinning me to the floor.
Hefty, still puffing on his briar, went down on his haunches. The frame is broken, he diagnosed, which explained why such an otherwise good piece of furniture was in the attic. Servants’ beds did not usually have enamelled flowers on them.
You never mentioned those before, Ruby complained.
They did not seem important.
‘You are imagining it, madam,’ Wormwood assured his mistress gently but firmly while Hefty lectured me on the importance of recording every detail. ‘There is nobody here.’
Enamelled, Hefty wrote in his notebook while, unbeknown to Dolores and her man, a fourth physical party had just joined us at the end of the bed – not quite a bird-eating spider but one probably capable of nibbling a sparrow’s drumstick.
‘Have a care, Wormwood! He has a dagger!’ Dolores cried so convincingly that a few atoms of me believed her and huddled with their friends for protection.
My new companion skuttled up and stopped about two inches from my face. I have never especially been afraid of arachnids, but this one looked like it thought my nose might make a good home.
‘And on its blade and dudgeon…’ Dolores bawled so loudly that, had I had room to leap out of my skin, I would have left it half a yard behind but I was starting to feel as if Dr Poynder were re-enacting his incubus imitation upon me. It was becoming difficult to breathe in, though breathing out was no problem at all as Dolores proved with an impressively energetic bounce. ‘Gouts of blood!’ she completed the line.
The recently knighted Sir Henry Irving could not have declaimed Macbeth’s speech more dramatically or so I imagined, only ever having seen him in Harrods trying on a pair of kid gloves and saying, ‘They are a little short on the fingers.’
Fascinating though your anecdotes of celebrated thespians in metropolitan department stores might be but are not, Ruby said acidly, I think we have more urgent concerns.
‘Madam has had a bad dream.’ Wormwood was trying to soothe his mistress.
He had very large expressive hands, I told Ruby, because I had not completed my account, and she sighed.
That is the forty-ninth time you have told me that.
‘If he is not here, who took the key?’ Dolores demanded and I rather wished that she had not, but a man who has made a statement will go to almost any lengths to defend it, rather than admit to the possibility that he could be wrong – especially to a woman.
‘Matilda must have,’ he theorised.
‘Silly Tilly,’ Dolores said and laughed.
‘Indeed, madam,’ he agreed.
The spider reared up and I toyed with the idea of blowing it away but was not sure if it could spring between my parted lips before I got the chance.
‘Silly-Tilly-silly-Tilly-silly-Tilly,’ Dolores sing-songed.
‘I shall fetch madam’s medicine,’ Wormwood decided as her voice clambered up the scale.
‘Silly-silly-silly-Tilly.’
The bed rose mercifully before plunging unmercifully and winding me. At least it proved that my blowing idea was not a bad one because, assailed by the typhoon forced out of my lungs, the spider scooted off in search of shelter.
‘Please try to calm yourself, madam,’ Wormwood said.
‘Silly-Billy-Willy-Tilly,’ Dolores’s refrain rose to a wail.
‘I shall be back in a moment,’ Wormwood promised, clearly disconcerted.
‘Sillllllly,’ she howled after him as the door closed and we were left alone.
Oh good, I thought and I could almost hear Friendless asking what was good about the situation.
Jane Eyre had got off lightly compared to me, I thought uneasily, for she had not actually been trapped in the attic with her madwoman.
Dolores must have moved again because the underneath of the bed rose, just high and long enough for me to squirm out, twisting my head as much as I could in an effort to ensure that she was not the one with the gory dagger of which she had talked.
‘I think that did the trick,’ she giggled.
You certainly had me fooled, I admitted silently.
But not me, Ruby claimed, though she was the one who had been muttering about madhouses.
If I might make an observation, Hefty said.
That would make a change, Ruby said.
Far from you being trapped, Hefty continued, you are at liberty to leave immediately. Wormwood had no key with which to lock the door.
‘How long will your man take?’ I asked Dolores.
‘Only a minute,’ she said. ‘The medicine is kept in a cabinet on the first floor and he will not want to leave me unguarded for long.’
Unguarded? Ruby and I queried but I said, ‘Then I must hide.’
‘Back under the bed?’
‘In another room,’ I told her. ‘I will come back when he has gone.’
‘Promise?’
‘Word of honour.’
It occurred to me that, if Wormwood glanced down, he might easily realise somebody had been there. The dust had been swept by my clothes, but I had neither the time nor the broom nor the spare dust for scattering to do anything about that. Regardless of those concerns, I reassured myself, and despite the real and imaginary detectives one reads about, men are unobservant creatures. Any wife who has been coiffured will vouch for that and few husbands will notice a new hat until the milliner’s bill arrives with the breakfast post.
Do not look at yourself in a mirror, Ruby advised. You may never recover.
A glance at my dress was enough to convince me that it was good advice.
I went back into the corridor, shutting the door behind me, placed the key on the floor a couple of feet from the frame and hurried into the only room that I had not looked into yet.
There were footsteps on the stairs again.
‘Silly-silly-sillllllly,’ Dolores recommenced her wail and I just had time to close the door behind me before Wormwood returned.
It was musty in that room but, compared to the one I had been in, no mountain or seaside resort had fresher air than that which I inhaled now. It could not completely erase the smell, though, which had impregnated my dress and clung to the inside of my nostrils, and the taste of it coated my tongue.
You cannot taste smells, Ruby sniffed, oh buwah! My mistake.
What kind of a word is buwah? I challenged her, squatting to peer through the keyhole.
An interjection, she bluffed. You will find it in the addendum of the Oxford English Di… He is coming back.
I saw Wormwood from behind, a big, black-haired man in dove grey trousers and a plain black swallowtail coat. He grunted something about falling off and bent to pick up the key before re-entering his mistress’s room.
With a name like that I will wager the Kohinoor diamond that his face is pock-marked, Ruby speculated.
You really must put that back before anybody notices that the one in the queen’s crown is made of quartz, I instructed and Ruby fell into a silent sulk. She had intended to have the gem mounted on a brooch. Where are you now? I asked, glancing over my shoulder.
I knew that I cried out, but I did not think it was aloud. A tangled-haired woman in ragged clothes was crouching behind me, her eyes burning from her filthy face, her lips curled in a hideous snarl and her body coiled ready to spring.