“My memory isn’t clear. Some of it was shock. Some of it was the nightmare of being taken from London directly to the asylum and never going home again. I was kept at the rectory until arrangements were made. I was dazed, confused, frightened out of my wits. I do remember being led away from something too ghastly to look at anymore. I could smell the blood on my hands and feel the stiffness of it on my shirt. And I remember vomiting on the stairs as we started down them. Robert took me away and tried to clean my face and hands, then shut me up somewhere. They were amazed to find me asleep on the floor when they came back for me. I remember they were shocked that I could sleep after what I’d done. I remember all that, but not what happened in that room-only in my dreams does it come back again, and for years I’d wake up screaming. I also remember standing in the drawing room of the London house, and my stepmother was telling someone-a policeman, I think-that she blamed herself for allowing me to accompany the family to London. She said that shutting me away in my room had made me resentful and angry, and twisted something in me, but she had thought London might be good for me. She’d wanted me to see a doctor there. It was the first I’d heard of it. She said-I can hear her voice now-that I’d killed the woman the way I’d have liked to kill her. That she’d found the pocketknife that my father had left me buried deep in her pillow one night, and never spoken of it.”
I felt cold, despite the tea. Peregrine was mad…however lucid he might seem at times.
But what was the difference between this man and Ted Booker? My conscience wanted to know. You were sympathetic enough to the soldier…
I tried to think of something else to talk about, something to take his mind off killing.
“Did you know where you were in London? Did you know the house where all this happened?” I was sure he couldn’t tell me.
“We were to spend the autumn in London. A month. My stepmother had friends there, relatives. We went up by train, and I was allowed to look out the window as long as I didn’t speak to anyone. The house in London seemed small after Owlhurst. But Timothy and Jonathan shared a room, and Arthur and I were put together. Robert took them to the zoo, but I stayed behind because I might make a scene. I was never allowed to see people, and my tutor told me that I was different and mustn’t make a fuss when I was told to stay in my room. He said people would stare at me and be unkind. I didn’t want to be stared at. And so they went to the Tower, and Arthur told me afterward about the cannon and the ravens. Everything was the same, I’d come to London but I might as well have stayed at home. There was an upstairs maid. She was pert, teasing, when no one else was about. I didn’t like her and told her so to her face. My stepmother put me in a room by myself, as punishment. One night there was a dinner party, and my stepmother went, taking Robert with her. I wasn’t well, I hadn’t been since I was put in the room alone. My head swam, and my stomach was queer. I remember lying on the floor, because it was cold, and it felt good. The rest is hazy, a botched jumble of images.”
He rubbed his face with his hands, scrubbing at it. I could hear several days’ growth of beard rasping against his palms, and his voice came through his fingers in an odd sort of echo that made it sound like someone else’s.
“That’s why it haunts me. I can’t make sense of things. What happened when, and who was there.”
“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t kill that young woman?” I thought he was hoping to win me over with a lie.
“I killed her. Of course I did. When the police showed me my knife, I told them the truth. Do you think I’d have lived nearly fourteen years in that godforsaken asylum if I wasn’t sure what I’d done?”
The admission was shocking.
“But you just said-you haven’t come to London to remember, you already have-” If I hadn’t been afraid before, I was now.
“You aren’t listening. I want to remember why I wanted to kill her. Why I picked up that knife, and when. And how it felt to do what I did that night. I’ve shut it out, it’s all missing, and when I was so ill, when I thought I was dying, I realized that I had to know. I had to put it all together and look at it in the light.”
His eyes were intense, and I wondered if I would live through his nightmare. Or since he knew what murder felt like, whether he would be eager to experience it again. I’d read somewhere that when men kill, as in wars, they lose a little of their humanity each time until it becomes easier, less awful, and they accept killing in a way that civilized people can’t tolerate. Whether it was true or not, I didn’t know. But in front of me was a man who had killed not in war but on a quiet London street, without provocation or, as far as I could see, a drop of repentance.
Peregrine Graham must be as dangerous as his family claimed-it would behoove me to be very careful, or I could trigger his anger and suffer the consequences.
A part of my mind said, They should have hanged him when they had the chance…
I asked, clearing away the tea things in an effort to keep my hands from shaking, “Peregrine. What good will it do to remember? What will you have gained, bringing it all back again?”
“I can heal.”
It was such an unexpected answer that I stared at him.
“You don’t know what it’s like to look in the mirror every time you shave and see a normal face when you know that beneath the flesh and bone there’s a monster inside. I told myself there in the bed in Owlhurst that if God forced me to live, I’d find a way to force myself to face myself.”
I caught my breath. It was all so logical. And so macabre I didn’t know how to respond.
He smiled crookedly. “This is a poor recompense for saving my life. But then I didn’t want it to be saved.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled envelope from Elayne’s letter. “You gave me the means. Unwittingly.”
I wanted nothing more than to turn back the clock, arrive on my doorstep and find the flat empty-or filled with my friends and their friends, all of them real, all of them normal.
I was allowed to go and do the marketing, a little later in the morning. I was reminded that Mrs. Hennessey would suffer if I talked to anyone, or sent a telegram to Kent. She was there at her door when I came back, smiling at me, asking how my arm was faring, and if I’d come to London to take up my next posting.
I answered her questions, smiling as if nothing had happened to change my world or hers. I told her that I’d been in Kent and had returned to London to spend a little time with friends, that I had missed them, shut away in Somerset.
She nodded and told me that I had only to ask, and she would bring me anything I needed.
I thanked her and went on up the stairs, feeling Peregrine in the darkness at the top, watching and listening. He had the door open for me, and then shut it behind me. “That was well done.”
Ten minutes later, he was asking me how to go about finding a particular house in London.
“You don’t remember where you were staying?” I asked, surprised.
“You don’t understand. I was never told these things. I was taken to the train, I was taken to the house, and I never left it until we returned to Kent. I can only tell you what I saw from my window-a fenced square with trees, a walk, several benches, and a gate on four sides. The house across from ours was a pale cream, with six chimneys, a false balcony on the upper floors-no more than an ornate iron railing in front of the windows-and a black door with a brass knocker and short iron railings up the two steps to the door.”
“There are any number of houses in London that match that description.”
I debated how far I should go in helping him, whether dragging my heels would wear him down or if helping him would buy some protection in the end.
“Then we’ll walk the streets until we find the right one.”