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A lot of things seemed to happen at once then, both quickly and in slow motion. I was thrown back a little way, staggered by the force of the shot I wasn’t braced for. Damien leapt out from behind the hanging and ran around to catch me and pull me away. Gabriel was thrown back into the chair, and there he lay, never to rise again.
Damien tried to stop me seeing, tried to impose himself between me and the body, but I saw what I’d done. In firing, I’d jerked the pistol upwards and rather than hitting him square in the chest, the shot had blown away half of his neck and part of his cheek. He was bleeding copiously, the blood seeping into Edwina’s most comfortable chair.
Peregrine appeared at the window, out of breath from having sprinted across the road. Tristan immediately leapt to tackle him, but I screamed at him not to.
‘Are you – did you shoot him?’ He looked at me, an expression of disbelief writ large on his face.
I laughed, and shook, the pistol still clamped between my hands. I wasn’t sure if I could ever let go of it.
‘Well done,’ he said in a voice tinged with reverence and awe. I laughed again. I couldn’t stop myself.
‘I think it’s time we sorted this out, don’t you think?’ Edwina strode up to the body and looked at it, her lips pursed and her head to one side, thoughtfully. ‘We can all congratulate Fleur later. Tristan, don’t you have an oil cloth in your studio?’
Tristan bounded from the room to fetch it, and Damien steered me towards the sofa, turning me so I wasn’t facing Gabriel. He stooped down in front of me and gently pried the pistol from my stiff fingers. I giggled again.
‘There now, dear, try and drink this. I think you’re in shock.’
Edwina forced a teacup into my hands, and I giggled again, spluttering slightly.
‘It is quite sweet,’ she said, ‘but I think you need the sugar. I’d give you some whiskey, but perhaps you’d rather not. No? Jane! Bring the good whiskey through, would you?’
‘I’ve found it,’ Tristan strode back into the room with a large roll of green fabric under his arm.
‘Now then, if you boys would be so good as to move that man off my chair, and wrap him in that? And you – Peregrine, did they say?’
Peregrine nodded.
‘Am I to take if from your earlier comment that you are on our side in this?’
‘Oh yes. Very much so.’ He shot me an encouraging smile.
‘Wonderful. And are you the only one out there? Did Mr Raynor have any other people watching the house?’
‘I’m the only one, Ma’am.’
‘This is all turning out rather well.’ Edwina clapped her hands together with pleasure and we all watched her with amazement, Damien and Tristan even pausing with Gabriel in their arms to turn and look at her. ‘And do you have another name we can call you? I don’t think you look like a Peregrine.’
‘Er, George?’
‘Much better. You’d better come in, George.’
The body was wrapped safely in the oilcloth and bound, looking ridiculously like an enormous green sausage. Edwina sat us all down and, after giving me another cup of very sweet tea, stood to announce her plan of action.
‘Now, Damien, you mentioned yesterday you might make killing Mr Raynor look like a mugging gone awry. I propose that is what we do. I suppose there are other members of his staff, and his mother, of course, who know he’s been coming here?’
Peregrine nodded.
‘Well, we should probably put his body somewhere between here and his house then. I daresay it won’t be all that convincing, but I doubt anyone will fight it. Given the nature of the real story, it’s better than nothing. And you,’ she rounded on my father, or rather, Patrick Mason, a man I knew. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
‘We all will.’ Damien said as he and Tristan rose. ‘Ought we plant Raynor’s body now, do you think, or should we wait until night?’
Edwina appeared to ponder this.
‘I’ll admit I don’t want him in my house any longer than necessary. But I’d much rather you two didn’t end up on the gallows either. Very well, take him out and put him in the shed. You can dispose of him tonight. I daresay it would be better to have more time to plan it, anyway.’
And plan they did.
* * *
Gabriel Raynor’s body was discovered the following morning. Bruised and bloodstained, Peregrine had staggered up to his late master’s house and claimed he had just recovered consciousness following an attack by armed bandits. While he had been knocked out, his master had not been lucky enough to share the same fate. As his spent pistol was found by his side, the magistrate decided a tussle had ensued in which Gabriel had been divested of his pistol, and shot in the head.
A verdict of murder was given, and I was free. It took less than twenty-four hours.
But I was guilty. Guilt clawed at me, and pursued me day and night. Despite the righteous anger that had caused me to pull the trigger, and despite the resolution of the entirety of my new family that Gabriel Raynor must die, still it was I who had taken that life. I struggled to handle it, and my body and my brain seemed to switch off. I floated around like a ghost, not interacting with anything or anyone.
Edwina helped, of course. She counselled me where I might rather not have spoken, and it lightened my soul. But she wasn’t the only one. What helped more than I expected, was talking to the man I had thought was my father. He sought me out the following day, as I stared into space, trying not to think about anything.
‘I could have taken the blame,’ he said as we sat opposite one another in the sitting room at dusk. ‘I ought to, perhaps.’
‘No,’ I said quietly, ‘you need not.’
He shrugged.
‘I’m not proud of what I did, you know. He’s – well, you know what he’s like, Gabriel. What he was like. How he twisted you and made you think that everything you did was wrong, and it would be both easier and right to go along with him. But I knew you were his daughter, and I should have been stronger. Hell, I should have killed him for you. I should have killed him a long time ago.’
‘I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,’ I said.
‘Look, Fleur. For the past seventeen years I’ve been scared of my own shadow. I grew restless, resentful that my life had been taken from me. But I was weak, and I ask your forgiveness. I loved your mother, but I couldn’t get over the pain I suffered after we married. Finding out about you, and Gabriel, and feeling like I’d been duped. I didn’t give enough time to thinking about the pain she suffered, too.’
What could I say? He was right, I supposed, but I didn’t care.
‘So, I’ve thought on it, and I’ll be leaving tomorrow to go back home. You can come with me if you wish.’
I hadn’t considered that. Hope flared briefly at the memory of seeing my little garden again.
‘I’d rather not,’ I said, ‘but thank you.’
Patrick stood and nodded to himself, sighing.
‘It’s too late, isn’t it? But please know, anything I can do for you, you can just tell me. I know you must hate me, but I’ll do anything. You set me free, you know that?’
‘I don’t hate you,’ I said. It was true. I simply didn’t have the energy to hate anyone. I barely had the energy to function. I was almost surprised at this, though. I felt I ought to hate him very much, but I just didn’t.
‘Well,’ he shuffled awkwardly. ‘Thank you, but, you know.’
Tristan loomed into the doorway and glared at Patrick as he stood beside me.
‘Are you still here?’ he asked, his eyes narrowed. He looked very threatening in the doorway, the weight of the frame behind him seeming to bulk him up.
‘I leave tomorrow.’ Patrick was a small man, dwarfed by Tristan’s willowy height, but he didn’t seem intimidated. Too little too late, but good for him, I supposed.
Tristan nodded in dismissal, and we were alone. Without a word he strode over to me and wrapped me into his arms, and I cried. It had been two days. Only two days, but nothing had changed. I was numb, and I could not foresee a time when I wouldn’t feel this way.
‘It wasn’t wrong, Fleur. You didn’t do anything wrong. He would have killed you, you know that.’
Tristan murmured into my hair, stirring the roots with his breath, warming me with his embrace. I cried on, and it felt a little better. For the past two days I’d had no tears, no emotion at all. My body had shut down so all I did was exist, breathing, eating but little, and sleeping fitfully. But now I had started I struggled to stop. Tears were running down my face, soaking Tristan’s shirt front, washing a little of my pain and fear away. My mind began to work again, just a little, and I began to really think about what had happened that day, and what had happened to me over the preceding few weeks.
Peregrine visited again, with news that the funeral would be held the following day. While Edwina fussed over whether or not he should come calling, and if that might incriminate the household, I was wondering whether or not to attend. God knew I didn’t want to. As his killer, perhaps I had no right, but as his wife I ought to be present. I saw it as my own personal penance. To go to his funeral, to see what I had done to his mother in her grief, to watch as his coffin was lowered into the ground, knowing that I was responsible and I alone. Could I have borne it if Damien had been the killer? If I had aided and abetted a murderer, would I have felt so numb? I was just a child, but perhaps we all were when we had plotted, little realising how final and irreversible it is to take the life of another.
‘We don’t have to go,’ Edwina said as we approached the churchyard. The last time I had seen it was when I ran away, consumed with fear.
‘You don’t have to come with me. I really don’t mind.’
She’d lent me a black dress and veil, and I felt that was more than enough.
‘Don’t be silly, I wouldn’t let you go alone. There are a lot of people here, aren’t there?’
And sure enough, I could count at least sixty people standing in ranks at least four deep at the sides of the freshly dug plot.
‘A lot of people work at the house,’ I said, and hated myself.
The coffin hovered above the open grave, supported by wide straps. I stared at it, beyond the staff who lined the graveside, and imagined the body in it that I had seen sprawled against Edwina’s chair, leaking.
A small, heavily veiled figure, swathed in black clothes cut in the style of another decade, stood at the head of the grave beside the vicar. Mrs Raynor.
Edwina and I remained, both veiled, at some distance from the funeral party. The drone of the vicar’s voice carried over the still churchyard, no more than murmurs, indistinct and monotonous. I couldn’t take my eyes from Mrs Raynor, my grandmother, as erect a figure as ever I had known her, and I wondered if she had her suspicions. She had known, she must have known according to her letter to Patrick, that her son had feelings for her daughter that went beyond the usual. But that could have been where her knowledge ended. Similarly, she may not have known precisely who I was.
I hoped she hadn’t known, but I couldn’t be sure. We had spoken little, and the side she had shown to me had been entirely different from that she had shown Patrick, and her daughter. I had received no offer of help or escape. Bitterness flared, and for the first time in three days I felt something other than guilt.
As the funeral drew to a close, Edwina and I slipped away. I felt detached from the whole thing, but as it marked the end of Gabriel’s life, it also marked the beginning of the end, I hoped, of his ability to affect me.