12. Confession Through a Keyhole

The house on the moor stood alone at the end of a road that was barely a road, a rutted track that wound through the heather and the gorse and the outcroppings of gray stone that jutted from the earth like the bones of some ancient, buried creature. Elena had never been here before. She had imagined it, of course, in the long hours of her vigil at Marcus's bedside, had conjured images of the place where Camille Delacourt had grown up, where her mother lay dying, where the secrets of a family were kept. But the reality was different from anything she had imagined.

The house was small and stone-built, with a slate roof that sagged in the middle and windows that were dark and blank as closed eyes. A garden had once existed at the front, but it had long since gone to seed, the rosebushes tangled and overgrown, the herbaceous borders choked with weeds. There was a smell in the air, a smell of damp and earth and the faint, sweet rot of decaying vegetation. It was a place that had been beautiful once, and was beautiful still, in a wild, melancholy way, but it was not a place where anyone would choose to die.

Elena knocked at the door, and after a long moment, it was opened by a maid, a thin, pale girl with red-rimmed eyes who looked as though she had not slept in days. "I have come to see Miss Delacourt," Elena said. "I am a friend."

The maid nodded and led her inside without a word. The interior of the house was dim and cold, the furniture draped in dust sheets, the air heavy with the smell of medicine and candle wax and the particular, indescribable odor of a sickroom. The maid led her up a narrow staircase and down a corridor to a room at the back of the house, and then she withdrew, leaving Elena standing alone before a closed door.

She knocked softly.

"Come in," said a voice, and Elena pushed open the door.

The room was small and crowded with the detritus of a long illness: medicine bottles on the nightstand, a basin of water on the floor, a chair pulled up close to the bed where a woman lay, so thin and pale and diminished that she seemed to be made of paper and shadow rather than flesh. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow and irregular, and her hands, folded on the counterpane, were little more than bones wrapped in translucent skin.

Beside the bed, in the chair, sat Camille Delacourt.

She looked, Elena thought, like a woman who had been hollowed out from the inside. Her face was gaunt, her eyes sunken, her hair lank and unwashed and tied back in a careless knot. She was wearing a dress of dark wool that might have been intended for mourning, and her hands, resting in her lap, were still, so utterly still, as though all the restless energy that had once animated her had been drained away.

"Mrs. Voss," Camille said, and her voice was hoarse with exhaustion. "You should not have come all this way."

"I wanted to see you," Elena said. "I wanted to see how you were."

Camille laughed, a dry, brittle sound that was almost a sob. "How I am. I am watching my mother die. I am watching the only person who ever loved me slip away, inch by inch, and there is nothing I can do. That is how I am."

Elena crossed the room and knelt beside the chair, taking Camille's cold, still hands in her own. "I know," she said. "I know what it is to watch someone die. My husband—"

She stopped. The words caught in her throat like a bone. My husband is dead because I killed him. My husband is dead because I poisoned him, drop by drop, over the course of weeks, and I watched him fade and I felt nothing. The confession was there, pressing against her lips, and she swallowed it down.

"I heard," Camille said, and her voice was softer now, gentler. "I heard about the judge. I am so sorry, Elena. I know he was not—I know your marriage was not what it should have been. But I am sorry for your loss."

Elena looked at Camille's earnest, exhausted face, and she felt a wave of something that was almost nausea. Here was the woman who had been her husband's mistress, offering her condolences on his death. Here was the woman who had sent a letter asking for his release, now speaking of him as though he were merely a difficult husband, a flawed man, someone to be mourned rather than reviled. Did Camille not know? Had she not guessed? Or was she, like Elena herself, a woman who had learned to wear masks, to hide her true feelings behind a facade of gentleness and grief?

"Thank you," Elena said. "It has been a difficult time."

They sat together in the dim, close room, and the silence stretched between them like a living thing. The sick woman on the bed breathed on, each breath a shallow, rattling whisper, and the clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes, and Elena tried to find the words for what she had come to say.

"Camille," she said at last, "I need to ask you something. It is a difficult question, and I would not ask it if it were not important."

Camille looked at her, and something flickered in her eyes, a shadow of wariness. "What is it?"

"Do you know a woman named Lise Markham?"

The name hung in the air like a bell struck once. Camille's face went very still, and her hands, which had been resting in Elena's, withdrew suddenly and folded themselves in her lap.

"Why do you ask?" she said.

"An inspector came to my husband's funeral. A woman named Cordelia Holt. She is investigating the disappearance of a young woman from the northern provinces, an artist's model named Lise Markham. She showed me a photograph. She asked me if I had ever seen her."

"And had you?"

"No," Elena said. "I had never seen her. But the inspector mentioned that the woman frequented the Black Swan, where my husband took his lunch on Tuesdays. She mentioned that the woman was an artist's model, that she sat for the painters of Ashwick." She paused, her eyes fixed on Camille's pale, frozen face. "I thought, perhaps, that you might have known her."

Camille was silent for a long moment. The clock ticked on. The sick woman breathed on. And then, very softly, Camille began to speak.

"I knew her," she said. "She was my friend."

The words fell into the silence like stones into still water. Elena felt her heart begin to beat faster, a slow, heavy thudding that seemed to shake her entire body.

"She came to Ashwick a year ago," Camille continued, her voice distant and dreamlike, as though she were reciting a story she had told herself many times. "She was from a village in the north, a place so small it did not even have a name. She had come south to find work, to escape a marriage that her family had arranged. She was beautiful, in a quiet, unassuming way, and she had a gift for stillness. She could hold a pose for hours without moving, without blinking, as though she had been born to be looked at."

"She modeled for you?"

"For me, and for others. There are not many models in Ashwick who are willing to sit for the kind of work I do. The nudes, I mean. The local girls are too respectable, or too afraid of their families. But Lise was different. She did not care what anyone thought. She said that her body was her own, to do with as she pleased, and no one had the right to judge her."

Elena listened, and as she listened, she felt the shape of a story beginning to form in her mind, a story that was darker and more complex than anything she had imagined.

"What happened to her?" she asked.

Camille closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were bright with tears. "She met your husband," she said. "At the Black Swan, where she went sometimes to sketch the patrons. He noticed her, as he noticed all pretty young women. And he—" She stopped, her voice breaking.

"He seduced her," Elena said. The words were flat and cold, but inside, she was reeling. Another one. There had been another one.

"Yes. He seduced her, and he used her, and when she became inconvenient, when she began to demand things he could not give, he—" Camille's voice cracked, and the tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. "He threatened her. He said that if she spoke a word to anyone, he would destroy her. He would have her arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned. He was a judge. Who would believe a penniless artist's model against a judge?"

Elena felt the world tilt around her. The journal, the cryptic entries, the words that had seemed so ominous: She grows more insistent. Must find a way to silence her. She had assumed, in the cold, dark hours after the funeral, that Marcus had killed the woman, had silenced her in the most permanent way possible. But the truth, Camille's truth, was different. He had not killed her. He had threatened her, terrorized her, driven her away.

"She disappeared," Elena said. "She fled."

"Yes. She fled. She wrote me a letter, a few weeks before she vanished. She said she was going back to the north, back to the village she had tried to escape. She said she could not bear to be in Ashwick any longer, that she saw him everywhere, that she was afraid of what he might do. And then—" Camille's voice broke entirely, and she buried her face in her hands.

"And then?" Elena pressed, though she was not sure she wanted to hear the answer.

"And then she was gone. I never heard from her again. I do not know if she reached her village. I do not know if she is alive or dead. I only know that she is gone, and that your husband was the reason."

The silence that followed was absolute. The clock had stopped, or perhaps it only seemed that way. The sick woman's breathing had grown fainter, barely audible, and the light through the window had shifted from gray to a deeper, more somber shade.

Elena sat very still, her mind working with the cold, precise logic that had become her only refuge. Marcus had not killed Lise Markham. He had driven her away with threats, but he had not killed her. And yet, the journal had said: The matter is resolved. The model will trouble me no more. He had believed, or wanted to believe, that she was gone for good. But he had not been certain. He had not known for sure.

And then there was the other entry: D. grows suspicious. Must be more careful. Camille had known about Lise Markham. Camille had been suspicious. Camille had, perhaps, been investigating her lover's secrets even as Elena had been planning her own revenge.

"What about you?" Elena asked, and her voice was soft, almost gentle. "What did you know about Marcus? About the other women?"

Camille lifted her head. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her face was blotched with weeping, but there was a hardness beneath the grief, a steel that Elena recognized.

"I knew he was not faithful to you," Camille said. "I knew that from the beginning. He told me you were cold, distant, that you did not understand him. He told me that his marriage was a sham, a prison from which he longed to escape. And I believed him. I was a fool, and I believed him."

"We were both fools," Elena said, and she was surprised by the bitterness in her own voice. "We both believed what he wanted us to believe."

"But you were not a fool at the end," Camille said, and her eyes met Elena's with a sudden, piercing intensity. "Were you?"

The question hung between them, charged with a meaning that neither of them dared to name. Elena looked at Camille, and Camille looked at Elena, and in that moment, they understood each other perfectly. They were two women who had been wronged by the same man, two women who had each, in their own way, sought a remedy. Camille had sought justice for her friend. Elena had sought something else entirely.

"I do not know what you mean," Elena said.

Camille held her gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded, slowly, and looked away. "No," she said. "I do not suppose you do."

The clock on the mantelpiece began to chime, a thin, tinny sound that seemed to come from very far away. Elena rose from her kneeling position, her knees aching from the hard floor, and straightened her skirts.

"I should go," she said. "Your mother needs you."

"She does not know I am here," Camille said, looking at the still figure on the bed. "She has not known for days. The doctors say it is only a matter of hours now. Perhaps less."

"I am sorry," Elena said, and she meant it. Whatever else Camille Delacourt was, whatever she had done, she was a woman who was losing her mother, and that was a grief Elena understood.

She turned to go, but at the door, she paused. "Camille," she said. "The inspector. Cordelia Holt. She may come to see you. She may ask you questions about Lise Markham, about my husband. What will you tell her?"

Camille did not look at her. She was looking at her mother's face, at the pale, still features that were already beginning to resemble a death mask. "I will tell her the truth," she said. "As much of it as I know."

Elena nodded, though Camille could not see her. "That is all any of us can do," she said.

She left the room and descended the narrow stairs and walked out into the cold, gray afternoon. The moor stretched away on all sides, empty and endless, and the wind was rising, and the first flakes of snow were beginning to fall. She walked back along the rutted track, her boots slipping on the frozen mud, her mind churning with everything she had learned.

Lise Markham. A woman she had never known, a woman who had been destroyed by the same man who had destroyed her own life. And now that woman's ghost was reaching out from the past, threatening to unravel everything.

She needed to think. She needed to plan. She needed to decide what to do about Camille, who knew too much and too little, who was a friend and an enemy and something else entirely, something Elena could not name.

But more than anything, she needed to prepare for the inspector, who was coming, who was asking questions, who was piecing together the fragments of a puzzle that Elena had never known existed.

The snow was falling faster now, and Ashwick Hall was still a long way off.