‘I’ve tamed wilder things than you, girl,’ said Lord Faukes, his voice tight with lust and amusement. ‘But fight on, if it please you. The harder won victory is always the sweeter.’ Starling felt air touch the backs of her legs as her skirt was lifted; felt her skin bruised as her drawers were torn away; felt that bone-deep warning, that knowledge she should not have had of what was coming. Knowing it made it hurt no less, and made it no less shaming. Her vulnerability, her failure to prevent what was happening filled her with a terrible rage, as incandescent as it was futile. She shrieked it out into the muffling cushions – every curse and threat and insult she knew, and then wordless cries when his thrusting began, tearing into her. It was not over quickly. Lord Faukes was not a young man; he took his time to take his pleasure.
Sometime afterwards, Bridget rushed in, eyes and mouth wide open, to find Starling still leaning over the arm of the sofa, staring at nothing, her jaw knotted tight at the hinges as she ground her teeth together.
‘I knew it… I knew it as soon as I saw him ride past me, all red in the face and loose in his limbs! The foul old bastard! May he rot!’ Bridget cried; the first and only time Starling heard her curse somebody. ‘May he rot! Are you injured? Can you rise?’
‘Don’t touch me,’ Starling ground out, and she felt Bridget hesitate, startled at her tone. There was a pause, a measured beat in which Bridget changed tack, subtly and effectively.
‘Well, you can’t stay there all day, bung upwards and bleeding on the carpet. Come up and let’s get you clean.’
‘I won’t ever be clean. And let the carpet go to bloody hell. Let the next lot worry about the stains on it, for we won’t be here much longer, he says.’
‘No more we will. But clean you shall be, Starling. The traces they leave can always be rinsed away.’
‘Not always. That was not the first time.’
‘I guessed as much.’ Slowly, Starling peeled herself up from the sofa, standing gingerly. Blood and seed ran down her leg and she shivered in revulsion. She met Bridget’s gaze, saw that the older woman was near as aggrieved as her by what had happened.
‘Only Alice stopped him until now,’ she said, and Bridget nodded.
‘Forgive me. You couldn’t know the danger. I’m sorry I went out.’
‘I knew it. And you had no choice but to go.’
‘I had a choice, but I was too much the coward to take it.’ Bridget’s breath suddenly hitched in her chest; she thumped a fist into her ribs and groaned. ‘But no more! No more! I will call him master no more!’ she cried out, then made a sound like a sob but dry, hollow.
‘Don’t cry, Bridget. Help me to wash instead. You’re right – I can’t stand the stink of him on me.’
‘How much older than your years you sound, Starling.’ Bridget scrubbed her face with her hands, then let them fall to her sides. ‘You always did. Come then. I’ll put water on to heat, and fetch the tub.’
Starling sat in the tub with her body stinging, the hot water too harsh on the lesions and bruises; she felt calm, almost dead.
‘How will it be without her, Bridget?’ she murmured.
‘We have no choice but to find out, my dear,’ said Bridget; a term that had always been reserved for Alice, until then. ‘You’re not bleeding each month yet, are you? At least there should be no child, then. And you are not a child any longer, Starling. You must choose where you would go, what you would do. This will not be the only time – that much I can assure you. If you continue to accept the wages of that man, this will not be the only time.’
‘You will go your own way, then, Bridget?’
‘I will. And take you with me, if you’ll go.’
‘What about Alice? How will she know where to find us?’
‘Alice is gone, girl. One way or another. Though it breaks my heart to say it.’
‘She will come back, I know she will. She wouldn’t just go and leave us. And what about Jonathan? She’d never leave him for another! You know it as well as I do!’ At this she saw Bridget pause, and choose not to tell her something. She had no will to demand to hear it. But she decided there and then that she would stay in Lord Faukes’s service. That she would stay near Jonathan, in a place that Alice would return to. Bridget seemed to know it too.
‘I would have kept you with me. Kept you safe and found you work. Remember that, in the times that are coming,’ said the older woman, gravely.
‘You can’t keep me safe. Only Alice could do that.’ She didn’t mean to be cruel but she saw the remark hit home. Bridget’s face pinched, and she said nothing more, fetching more hot water and clean towels in silence. Starling sat and she thought and she waited. She waited to find out how life would be from then on.
I must find her last letter. Starling carried on up the stairs without thinking, to the second floor of the house on Lansdown Crescent. She didn’t pause to check where Mrs Alleyn was, or Mrs Hatton, or Dorcas. A smell of cinders and baked fish lingered in the stairwell. Never once had she believed that Alice had written a letter to Lord Faukes, to tell him of her elopement; she knew a bare-faced lie when she heard one. Her thoughts were troubled, turning this way and that, trying to fix on something clear. Damn Mrs Weekes and her theories. Could she be Alice’s sister? When Mrs Weekes had described the way her infant sister died, Starling had remembered Alice’s sudden fear on the day they’d swum in the river at Bathampton. Remembered how close she’d come to panic when Jonathan suggested swimming out into the current. Could that have been a distant memory, resurfacing? A nameless warning, like those that Starling’s early years had left her with? Starling shook her head, muttering refutations beneath her breath. Alice was my sister. Rachel Weekes muddies the water, nothing more. She is a fantasist! The reason why Jonathan killed Alice was in Alice’s last letter to him, sent to Brighton, and it was not that she had fallen in love with another. It had to be something else, something which had brought him hurrying back to Bathampton; something which had turned him wild and mad.
She was at his door and breathing hard, and then inside without knocking. At the sound, Jonathan came from his bedchamber with his shirt untucked and rumpled, his hair a mess in front of his eyes.
‘Starling? What’s happened?’ he said, tilting his head at her; his tone so normal, so understated that Starling took a step backwards. Time and reality skidded around her. Here is the man I hate. Does he not know that I hate him? ‘Are you well? You’re so pale.’
‘Am I well?’ She reeled slightly, putting out her hands for balance. ‘This is all wrong,’ she murmured, dizzily. Past his bedraggled figure, on the cluttered desk, was a knife. A pewter blade, dull in the low light; a blunt instrument for the breaking of seals and the splitting of figs. Blunt, then, but still lethal, if used with enough force. Starling stared at it as Jonathan watched her, bewildered. Three steps were all that were needed, she calculated. Three quick steps, a turn and a strike, and whatever truths he knew would bleed out of him and drip through the fancy plasterwork of the ceiling below. She rolled onto the balls of her feet, balancing herself.