By the following day Jane was gone. I followed at a safe distance to see her take the road to Whitcross, looking like a small stray searching for a better life elsewhere. I watched her until she was out of sight and then walked into Millcote for lunch. Once I had finished my meal at The George I played cards with three travelling gamblers; by suppertime I had taken six guineas off them. As I played, a small boy appeared at our table.
‘Hello, William!’ I said. ‘What news?’
I bent down to the height of the waif, who was dressed in adult-sized hand-me-downs that had been sewn up to fit.
‘Begging your pardon, Miss Next, but Mr Hedge has vanished.’
I leaped up in some alarm, broke into a run and didn’t stop until I arrived at The Millcote. I flew upstairs to the landing, where one of my most trusted spies was tugging at his flat cap nervously. Hades’ room was empty.
‘I’m sorry, miss. I was in the bar downstairs, not drinking, mind; I swear to it. He must have slipped past me—‘
‘Did anyone else come down the stairs, Daniel? Tell me quick!’
‘No one. No one save the old lady…’
I took the horse from one of my riders and was at Thornfield in double-quick time. Neither of the guards at the doors had seen anything of Hades. I entered and found Edward in the morning room, toasting himself from a bottle of brandy. He raised his glass as I entered.
‘She’s gone, hasn’t she?’ he asked.
‘She has.’
‘Damnation! Curse the circumstances that allowed me to be trapped into the wedding with that halfwit and curse my brother and father for entreating such a union!’
He fell into a chair and stared at the floor.
‘Your work is done here?’ he asked me resignedly.
‘I think so, yes. I have only to find Hades and I can be off.’
‘Is he not at The Millcote?’
‘Not any longer.’
‘But you expect to capture him?’
‘I do; he seems weakened here.’
‘Then you had better tell me your password. Time may not be on our side when the moment comes. Forewarned is forearmed.’
‘True,’ I conceded. ‘To open the door, you have to say—‘
But at that moment the front door slammed, a gust of wind disturbed some papers, and a familiar footfall rang out on the tiles in the hall. I froze and looked across at Rochester who was staring into his glass.
‘The code word—?’
I heard a voice calling to Pilot. It had the deep bass resonance of the master of the house.
‘Blast!’ murmured Hades as he melted from his disguise as Rochester and leaped at the wall in a flash, bursting through the lath and plaster as though it were rice paper. By the time I had made my way to the hallway outside he had gone; vanished somewhere deep into the house. Rochester joined me as I listened intently up the stairs, but no sound reached us. Edward guessed what had happened and quickly mustered his estate workers. Within twenty minutes he had them guarding the outside of the house, under strict orders to fire upon anyone who tried to escape without giving a prearranged password. This done, we returned to the library and Rochester drew out a set of pistols and loaded each carefully. He looked uneasily at my Browning automatic as he placed two percussion caps atop the nipples of the pistols and replaced the hammers.
‘Bullets just make him mad,’ I told him.
‘You have a better idea?’
I said nothing.
‘Then you had better follow me. The sooner this menace is out of my book the better!’
All except Grace Poole and the madwoman had been removed from the house, and Mrs Poole had been entreated not to open the door to anyone until the morning on any account, not even to Mr Rochester. Rochester and I started at the library and moved through to the dining room and then the afternoon reception room. After this we searched the morning reception room and then the ballroom. All were empty. We returned to the staircase where we had placed John and Mathew, who both swore no one had passed them. Night had descended by this time; the men who stood guard had been given torches and their meagre light flickered in the hall. The stairs and panelling of the house were of a dark wood which reflected light poorly; the belly of a whale would have been brighter. We reached the top of the stairs and looked left and right, but the house was dark and I cursed myself for not bringing a good flashlight. As if in answer to my thoughts a gust of wind blew out the candles and somewhere ahead a door banged. My heart missed a beat and Rochester muttered an oath as he stumbled into an oak chest. I quickly relit the candelabrum. In the warm glow we could see each other’s timorous faces, and Rochester, realising that my face was a reflection of his own, steeled himself to the task ahead and shouted:
‘Coward! Show yourself!’
There was a loud concussion and a bright orange flash as Rochester fired off a shot in the direction of the staircase leading to the upper rooms.
‘There! There he goes, like a rabbit; I fancy I winged him too!’
We hurried to the spot but there was no blood; merely the heavy lead ball embedded in the banister rail.
‘We have him!’ exclaimed Rochester. ‘There is no escape from up here except the roof and no way down without risking his neck on the guttering!’
We climbed the stairs and found ourselves in the upper corridor. The windows were larger up here but even so the interior was still insufferably gloomy. We stopped abruptly. Halfway down the corridor, standing in the shadows and with his face lit by the light of a single candle, was Hades. Running and hiding were not his style at all. He was holding the lighted candle close to a rolled-up piece of paper that I knew could only be the Wordsworth poem in which my aunt was imprisoned.
‘The code word, if you will, Miss Next!’
‘Never!’
He placed the candle closer to the paper and smiled at me. ‘The code word, please!’
But his smile became an expression of agony; he let out a wild cry and the candle and poem fell to the ground. He turned slowly to reveal the cause of his pain. There, on his back and clinging on with grim determination, was Mrs Rochester, the madwoman from Jamaica. She cackled maniacally and twisted a pair of scissors that she had buried between Hades’ shoulder blades. He cried out once again and fell to his knees as the flame from the lit candle set fire to the layers of wax polish that had built up on a bureau. The flames greedily enveloped the piece of furniture and Rochester pulled some curtains down in order to smother them. But Hades was up again, his strength renewed: the scissors had been withdrawn. He swiped at Rochester and caught him on the chin; Edward reeled and fell heavily to the floor. A manic glee seemed to overcome Acheron as he took a spirit lamp from the sideboard and hurled it to the end of the corridor; it burst into flames and ignited some wall hangings. He turned on the madwoman, who went for him in a blur of flailing limbs. She deftly whipped Mycroft’s battered instruction booklet from Hades’ pocket, gave a demonic and triumphant cry and then ran off.
‘Yield, Hades!’ I yelled, firing off two shots. Acheron staggered with the force of the slugs but recovered quickly and ran after Bertha and the book. I picked up the precious poem, and coughed in the thick smoke that had started to fill the corridor. The drapes were now well alight. I dragged Rochester to his feet. We ran after Hades, noticing as we did so that other fires had been started by Acheron in his pursuit of the instruction manual and the insane Creole. We caught up with them in a large back bedroom. It seemed as good a moment as any to open the portal; already the bed was ablaze and Hades and Bertha were playing a bizarre game of cat-and-mouse with her holding the booklet and brandishing the scissors at him, something he seemed to be genuinely fearful of.