‘What did… why…’ Starling shook her head. She clasped at her stomach, suddenly feeling like she would vomit.
‘I was to woo her. I was to lure her away. I was to tempt her into loving me, and disgracing herself. I was to make Jonathan Alleyn discard her.’
‘By who? By who were you sent to do these things?’
‘By his lady mother, of course. By Josephine Alleyn, another one who did not love me.’ He took another swig, his voice heavy with self-pity, slurring from his drink-thickened tongue. ‘With my glorious face, she said, I could not fail. With my glorious face.’
With a bump, Starling sat down in the mud. Her muscles were unresponsive; she struggled to take in what Dick was saying.
‘After Alice went to Box, after she went to Lord Faukes… When she recovered… she was quiet and secretive. She was sad… she wrote letters, but no letters came back.’
‘Her letters were not sent. Not a one. All were intercepted and carried back to his lordship. I was to make her ruin herself and abandon Mr Alleyn before he returned from overseas. She was to tell him nothing, and do nothing to hasten his return.’
‘One letter was sent,’ Starling said woodenly.
It went on a February day not long before Alice’s death, when the sky was a threatening mass of cloud, and there were tiny flecks of rain on the breeze. In those days Alice still went out alone, and at strange times, but rarely with Starling or Bridget. She was keeping a secret, Starling knew – possibly more than one; the kind of secret that gradually, inexorably, wore a person away. Her eyes looked bruised all the time, and she never smiled. Even at Christmas, which Alice loved, she’d been sombre and sad, picking at the roast goose on her plate and offering no opinion on the decorations.
‘Won’t you tell me, Alice? Won’t you tell me why you can’t marry Jonathan?’ Starling whispered, lying nose to nose in bed one night. She pulled the blankets up over their heads, so that Alice would feel safe and Bridget would not hear.
‘I cannot.’
‘Then promise not to leave me!’
‘I have already…’
‘Promise it again!’
‘I promise-’ Alice broke off, and hesitated. ‘I promise not to leave you, Starling,’ she finished. But somehow this promise, extracted in darkness, did nothing to reassure Starling. She knew that change was coming, she just could not tell the shape of it.
Since the lovers’ tree Starling was determined to prove steadfast and true to her sister, so she didn’t keep cajoling her to speak, but only tried to cheer her. She fell back on that childish recourse of pretending all was well in hopes of making it so; begging Alice to read with her, to teach her poems, to go with her on walks and errands – all without success, until that cloudy day, when at last she agreed to go out. They went into the village, and Starling noticed Alice staring into the faces they saw, as if calculating, or searching for something. On the way back Starling waved and called out to a familiar barge travelling west, and Alice grabbed at her arm.
‘Do you know that man?’ she said, as they stepped back to allow the plodding horse to pass.
‘Yes, that’s Dan Smithers,’ said Starling.
‘Would he do a small favour, if you asked him? Is he an honest man?’
‘I think he would. I think he is.’
‘Then bid him take this letter for me, and send it on from Bath,’ said Alice, urgently, pressing the folded paper into her hand.
Starling ran on a few paces, and called out.
‘Mr Smithers! Will you carry this letter to Bath for us, and send it on?’
‘What’ll you pay me, bantling?’ Dan called back, taking his pipe out from between his teeth.
‘I have a farthing… and I can sing you a song, if you like?’ At this the bargeman laughed and moved to the edge of the deck, reaching out to take the letter.
‘Keep your farthing, girl. Only a goosecap would cast chink over water.’ He tucked Alice’s letter into his shirt and drifted on his steady way.
‘Will he do it?’ said Alice, watching the bargeman’s retreating back with a strange, hungry look in her eyes. ‘Will he send it?’
‘Of course.’ Starling shrugged. Alice sighed then, and the hand that held Starling’s squeezed it tight, as if for courage.
‘Then we shall soon see,’ she said; words as desperate and hopeless as a faithless prayer.
‘Jonathan Alleyn got that letter – it was that which brought him rushing back here, from Brighton,’ said Starling. The frosty ground she sat on was eating into her flesh, but she could hardly feel it.
‘Well, it made no difference,’ said Dick.
‘It did to him. It did to Mr Alleyn.’
‘It made no difference to Miss Beckwith.’
‘Why did you kill her? Why? She was good… only ever good! She was my sister.’ Starling could hardly speak for the grief crushing her.
‘I never meant to! Do you think I meant to?’ Dick erupted to his feet. The brandy bottle flew from his hand and landed in front of Starling, the last drops splattering out. ‘Do you think I meant to? I did not. I… she was kind, like you said. I wanted her to love me.’ He laughed again, high-pitched and strange.
‘You’re mad.’
‘I was meant to make her love me, and the bitch made me want her to! How’s that for a twist of fate.’ He lurched to one side and retched violently, sending a spew of rancid brandy onto the riverbank. ‘But by God, she was stubborn.’ He coughed, spat, wiped his chin on his hand.
‘She wouldn’t betray him. She wouldn’t betray Jonathan Alleyn.’
‘Clung to thoughts of that Hopping Giles like a nun to Christ’s bloody cross. She only agreed to meet me because I swore I would open my own veins if she refused. She tried to talk me out of it – out of all the devotion and unending love I professed, as ardently as any bleeding poet. She sat patiently and listened to me harp on, and then told me sweetly that it could not be; that her heart belonged to another for all of time, even if they could not marry. When I said I would drown myself in the river if she didn’t consent to an elopement she just gave me a look, all grave and sedate, and said “Do not, sir, I beg you. Only try to forget me, and find another to love.” ’ He strained his voice into a grotesque parody of Alice’s.
‘She was true to him,’ Starling whispered. ‘When she would not betray, did Mrs Alleyn bid you kill her?’
‘No! Not… not baldly put, not like that. I knew she desired it, though. But I never meant to. I only… thought to frighten her. To scare her into obeying me, and accepting me…’
‘To scare her into loving you? You’re a pitiful fool, Dick Weekes.’
‘And you were my whore, Starling,’ he sneered at her.
‘What did you do to her?’
‘I only struck her. Just a blow, to that pretty face. I shook her a little first, and made threats… She said if I loved her I would let her be, so I gave her a blow across the chops, and she fell down, and… and… it wasn’t enough to kill her! It wasn’t enough for that! But she was pale as death itself, lying there on the ground, and she gasped like a landed fish. The only colour she had was the blood on her teeth. I thought she was playing me for a fool… I thought she was feigning injury. But then she… she stopped gasping.’ He shook his head as if bewildered. ‘Dear God but I’ve seen her gasping like that, and those red teeth, in a thousand dreams since then.’ He shuddered. ‘But it wasn’t enough to kill her… it wasn’t! I’ve hit enough women to know what force to use.’
‘You dog.’ Starling could hardly speak. Her body was shaking so hard her teeth rattled in her skull. ‘You dog! Her heart was fragile… it could not stand a shock, or too much agitation.’
‘It wasn’t my fault. She wasn’t supposed to die.’