“Why don’t you let her show you where you will be sleeping?” Louisa said to O’Leary. “You must need a rest after your journey and then we will meet for dinner. You will hear the gong.”
O’Leary wanted to say that he was not feeling at all tired – indeed, he was energized and alert – but he decided against it.
“Do you like to dress for dinner?” He shook his head, but vaguely, feeling his way. “I prefer to,” Louisa went on. “But it’s up to you.” She glanced at his case of magical effects and apparatus. “I assume this is not your overnight case?”
“No. These are the tools of my trade. What you asked me to bring.”
“Excellent. This evening we shall relax after we have dined, and come to know each other more. But tomorrow I shall be intent on learning about your conjuring. You need have no worries about secrets. I honour all confidences in my quest for knowledge.”
“You wish to become a magician?” O’Leary said.
“I intend to add the art of illusionism to my atchievements.”
She pronounced the word deliberately, her tongue briefly touching her teeth, making the small but distinct dental sound of the ‘t.’ She was looking closely at him, as if to judge his reaction.
O’Leary headed for the stairs, clutching his case of magic. Mrs Acland, who had been standing in the hall, courteously swung the doors open to allow him to pass through. She led O’Leary to the room on the top floor where he would sleep.
A log fire had been set in the grate and was burning cheerfully. A gas mantle gave a steady but weak white light into the room. As he entered, O’Leary groped instinctively for an electric switch. One was there on the wall beside the door, and a shaded fitting hung on a flex in the centre of the ceiling, but no light issued from it.
A change of his own clothes was laid out for him, in fact the sharply cut suit that he wore when he was performing. Never normally to be worn in daily life, the royal-blue suit had an inner lining that was a secret network of hidden pockets and slits, loops of thread, elastic bands.
The bedroom was under the steep roof of the house, well-proportioned, clean and furnished in traditional style. The bed stood high off the floor. The dormer window, built out of the sloping roof, was heavily curtained with dark green damask, satin stripes worked into the thick fabric, reaching to the floor, tasseled. A small shower room and toilet lay beyond a white-painted door.
He could not gain a signal on his mobile; no text messages had arrived since he left Brighton earlier. He pressed the handset to the window, hoping to enhance whatever network signal there might be, but there was nothing. He had wanted to contact Rick, tell him how things were working out, but it was not to be.
He booted up his laptop, but there was no wi-fi within range. He looked around the room for a cable connector, without success. He knew that Louisa had repeatedly emailed him, so there must be a landline connection somewhere in the house.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his legs dangling. A stuffed owl, inside a glass case on a low shelf, stared at him with wide orange eyes. O’Leary could still smell patchouli, where a trace of it had transferred to his hand. He ran his fingers beneath his nostrils, smiling to himself. He rolled back across the bed and pedalled his feet in the air with pleasure.
An hour later, when he heard the gong sound from the stairwell below, O’Leary walked downstairs for dinner, dressed in his stage suit.
There was nothing to be seen of Louisa the next morning when O’Leary went early to breakfast. He ate alone, sitting at a long, highly polished oak table. It was in a windowed conservatory, heated by circulating pipes and filled with exotic trees and shrubs. They stood in calm array around him, while outside the trees in the garden and in the woods beyond were bent and battered by a chill, sleet-bearing easterly wind.
When Louisa appeared later in the drawing room, she made no comment or apology. He went in to join her, as she went to the grand piano. She raised the lid, momentarily adjusted the height of the stool, then began playing. She played from memory, without sheet music. Within moments she was entranced by the music, rocking her head to and fro, her eyes tightly shut. O’Leary sat down a short distance behind her, unable to recognize the piece but astonished by her virtuoso skill. At the end she identified it as Liszt’s first Liebestraum nocturne.
She moved to a music stand, put some music in place, clearly hand-drafted, then picked up a violin. After briefly checking that the instrument was in tune she opened with a dazzling solo, a series of darting clusters and arpeggios, each counterpointing the one it had followed. The piece ended with a shift to a slow, melodic lament, exquisitely beautiful and melancholic.
O’Leary clapped his hands, but Louisa smiled him to silence.
“I am not a show-off, Dennis,” she said. “But I want to tell you that I composed and arranged that piece myself. I am not trying merely to impress you, even though the composing and performing of music is one of my many attainments, my atchievements.” Again, the deliberate dental sound of the extra letter. “It is important to me that you understand the nature and extent of my atchievements.”
He said, “Well, I am extremely impress –”
“No – allow me to demonstrate more. I do have a purpose, to help you understand what might become possible between us.” She carefully laid aside her violin, closing it inside its case. “I am a woman of many attainments. I am an avid and successful learner. I executed most of the paintings you can see on these walls. I am an adventurous cook. I am a mathematician, a geologist, a strong swimmer. Would you care to witness my skill as a sharpshooter?”
“I think not.” But she was intent upon this purpose. Nothing that passed between them, during the long evening they had spent together the night before, had given him any idea she would act or perform in such a way. Yesterday she seemed gentle, sensitive, enquiring about him, quietly interested in everything he said. Now she was assertive, dominant. “I should love to hear you play again,” he said. “Do you know any more instruments?”
She reached behind her, then held out a flute in one hand, an oboe in the other.
“Enough of music,” she said, laying the instruments aside again. “I am adept in six European languages and can make sense of half a dozen more. I fashioned many of the collectible pieces you see in this room: I am a skilled potter and porcelainist. I am also a cabinet-maker, and for example I built the side-table on which you are now resting your hand.”
She moved towards him and raised her face towards his.
“My dear Dennis, if I may speak to you candidly. I am not seeking to impress you. I am trying to clarify the position in which I have found myself, and now in which you find yourself.” Once again he heard the weird incantation of her formal way of speaking, at odds with the more relaxed words they had exchanged yesterday, not to speak of her body language, which he found provocative.
“I am, as you know, a widow,” she went on. “In the common parlance of the world I knew with my husband, I would be called a house to let. I seek a partner to join me, because the house I have to let is haunted. Yes, haunted by the past, Dennis! I must find someone to be with me, to protect me from the past. Until then I remain in mourning. I am required to wear the widow’s weeds, this purple, this black, these shrouds of grey and silver.
“Outside this building I display, as you noticed when you arrived, my atchievements. Inside, as a house to let, I work constantly to perfect the skills and acquire fresh ones. Until I find the right one to join me, I collect accomplishments.” Her face grew ever closer to his and her voice became softer, a bare whisper. “I am a wealthy woman and I seek attainments. I do not mind what I have to spend to make these atchievements. I also seek a partner in life, a shield against the past. Could that man be you?”