The Honours Read online

  Not just madness, but accusations of vampirism? And his young wife dead in a fire not long after giving birth to their only son. No wonder he had filled the Hall with paintings of her.

  Most pertinent of all was the book’s suggestion that Lord Alderberen’s father had built the tunnels to transport horses. As a diligent student, Delphine had a responsibility to find out more.

  She had a duty to her country, too. What if Mr Propp were using these tunnels to meet his contacts from across the channel? She must at least check the entrances for signs of use.

  The long library had big leather books marbled with damp, containing maps of the Hall and grounds. Design sketches in faded brown ink showed structures like the mausoleum and the ice house. None appeared to show the tunnels, but then most were more than fifty years old. At last, in a thick new album stuffed with photographs (mainly studies of trees, but including several pages of hunting parties in the field, reposing on wicker chairs in bowler hats and tweed waistcoasts, the grandeur of their moustaches matched only by the circumference of their paunches) she had found a foldout hand-drawn map behind a sheet of glassine paper, depicting the entirety of the Alderberen estate: to the north, Prothero Wood and the ocean, to the west, the village of Pigg, to the south, the railway station, and, sinuating from the Hall like the arms of an octopus, four trails of red dashes signifying, according to the legend: tunnels.

  They all appeared to begin at the house, but getting below stairs was a trial worthy of Orpheus. The housekeeper Mrs Hagstrom ruled everything her side of the green baize door. She was impressed by no one, serene in her judgements, strong and terrible as a valkyrie. If she had a weakness, Delphine could not yet guess at its nature.

  Delphine had decided to search for the tunnel entrances across the estate. Surely Mr Garforth would see no harm in her observing from a safe distance. How could she avoid them unless she knew where they were?

  One tunnel apparently emerged inside the boat house, but after jemmying the lock (the wood was splintered anyway and it would have fallen off sooner or later) and slipping inside, hunting amongst the humid funk of mildewed canvas, listening to punts bump and knock, she found no sign of an entrance. Perhaps it was underwater.

  The mouth of the western tunnel, near Pigg, was a sandstone arch blocked with dirt and smashed bricks. It had obviously been that way for some time – beech roots had threaded into the soil, binding it together. She dug at the pile for a few minutes before giving up.

  When she found the northern tunnel, near the beach, she stood back, observing. Surely it would make no odds if she shuffled an inch closer. Soon, she was ducking inside. After all, she had obeyed Mr Garforth’s edict about staying away from the woods. She would just have a quick glance, for the purposes of her essay, then leave.

  The stone floor was slimy with mud; ragworms squelched beneath her splayed fingers. Pools flashed in the torchlight. She found a sprat, twitching forlornly. This section obviously flooded at high tide. The stench got thicker as she went deeper. The ceiling dripped. She had to duck right down and squirm forward on her belly. Sharp nodules of rock scraped her breastbone, her bare knees, her raw and freezing hands. If Lord Alderberen’s father intended these tunnels for horses, he must have bred them very small indeed.

  The crawlway ended in a ladder of iron stemples leading up. She stood. Now she had come all this way, it seemed silly to turn back – ungrateful, almost. She needed both hands. She switched off the torch.

  The dark was liquid. She slipped the torch into her rucksack then felt for the first rung. Her hand slid over lichen-greased rock. The rung was gone. She spider-walked her fingers up the wall. They closed round cold, wet metal.

  The stemples were slippery. The only grip came from blisters of rust and, on the lower rungs, the occasional barnacle. Delphine climbed, the sure weight of her drawstring bag swaying between her shoulder blades. Her hand found a ledge. She swung her bag onto it, hauled herself up.

  She switched on her torch. Ahead, a long, vaulted tunnel led into darkness. She pulled the bag tight on her shoulders, spat, and marched into the unknown.

  * * *

  According to the map, the tunnel ended beneath Alderberen Hall’s wine cellar. Delphine stood at a crossroads, breathing damp, chilly air. Other tunnels branched off into the darkness. A ladder led up towards a trapdoor.

  Delphine picked a tunnel and followed it. It was wide and airy and apparently not very deep underground – through corroded ventilation grilles in the ceiling, she could hear the wheezy ee-wits of lapwings. The tunnel curved and the damp atmosphere increased. Delphine’s feet were aching and she thought she might be getting blisters.

  The beam from her electric torch was beginning to dim. She would have to go to the village to buy new batteries. It had just occurred to her that they might not last till she found an exit when the light winked out.

  For a dizzying moment, she did not know which way was up. She steadied herself against a cold stone wall. She shook the torch.

  Her eyes began adjusting. Faint threads of light from a ceiling grate caught the curve of the walls. There was something up ahead.

  Dragging her fingertips along the stonework, she edged forwards. Hard black lines sharpened into the bars of two sturdy iron gates. Metal flaked under her thumb as she felt for the lock. They were rusted shut. She gave them a few experimental kicks; they did not even wobble. She pressed her face to the bars.

  In the darkness she could make out broken, half-shapes – things that might have been smooth clods of earth, things that seemed to shift and cower as she peered at them. She heard rustles, clicks.

  ‘Pow!’ she yelled. Her voice shattered and faded.

  As she stepped back from the gates, the torch clipped the wall and the tunnel blazed with light. She was blind. She threw an arm up to shield her eyes. She heard scuttling, a clatter, breaths. Rats? Or her own panicked stumbles echoing back at her?

  As her eyes adjusted, she squinted in the direction of the torchbeam. The tunnel was empty.

  *‘He manages to make war and swordfights boring. I hated all the swooning.’

  CHAPTER 9

  THE INSCRUTABLE MR KUNG

  June 1935

  Delphine walked the track into Pigg, buzzing with secrets. Rain had fallen that morning and the big walnut tree over Mr Wightman’s shop was fragrant and dripping. Outside the forge yard, an upended pram rusted beneath a sign for Spratt’s Patent Dog Cakes. The pram’s wheels had been removed; horse parsley sprouted through a rip in its black belly.

  She entered through a fog of brushwood smoke. Mr Wightman was shoeing cartwheels. He had finished the dreary bit with the machine and the rollers, and was heating each iron tyre on a bonfire to make it expand. She watched him hammer a tyre onto a wooden wheel then douse it in water; it hissed like a goose and coughed great bushes of steam as it shrank and tightened. He repeated the process, shoeing four more wheels of different sizes. Without waiting to be asked, Delphine tossed sticks onto the fire when she felt the heat dwindling.

  When he was done, Mr Wightman stepped back and rubbed his buckled forehead with a rag. He rolled himself a cigarette, then snatched a twig out the fire and blew on the end for a light. He paused between drags to take the cigarette from his mouth and frown at it sceptically, as if he thought it were somehow trying to cheat him. Once he was halfway through, he looked at her.

  ‘All right?’

  She wiped a twist of hair from where it had caught in the nook of her eye, and nodded.

  ‘Good.’ Mr Wightman’s head had a deep dent just above his right eye. He said it was from where he’d been kicked trying to shoe a horse with the misleading name of Punch. He wore a leather apron and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing forearms decorated with glossy pink-white scars.

  Delphine loosened the drawstring on her bag and rummaged through a drift of envelopes until she had retrieved one, two, three, four large keys. Mr Wightman held out his hand. She gave him them one at a time. His skin had
the same tough, grainy texture as a pig’s. He held each key to the light, like a jeweller.

  ‘I’ll get them done this afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He tipped his head back and took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘So they’ve got you running errands for them?’ He looked at her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not got domestics for that?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes, but I said I’d do it.’

  ‘Do you want me to send my bill to the Hall?’

  ‘No. I have some money. They gave me the money.’

  ‘They’ve been losing a lot of keys lately.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He dropped his cigarette and scrunched it out with his heel. ‘How’s the crab hook?’

  ‘Good, thank you.’ A fortnight earlier, Mr Garforth had given her a birthday gift – a broom handle with a bit of thin iron rod attached to one end, twisted into a hook. He’d had Mr Wightman make it for her, and though it was clearly the work of a few minutes, she treasured it because it had been her only present. Mother had given her a smart blue skirt, a hairbrush decorated with a butterfly and an atlas for her studies, but those didn’t count because they were things Mother thought Delphine ought to have, not what she had wanted.

  ‘See you later, then,’ he said.

  She walked out of the forge. Wiping her nose, she sniffed the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. A metallic tang mixed with woodsmoke mixed with vinegar.

  She only ever borrowed the keys. It was not stealing, and besides, she was acting in the defence of the realm. If she was to gather the proof she needed, she had to get access to every room in the house – especially the locked ones. Time was running out. She had not managed to get back into Propp’s study, nor his bedroom, but when she did, his ticket to the gallows was all but assured.

  She closed her eyes and, for a while, walked blind. Her bag felt light. As she reached the edge of the village, she heard voices.

  Two children – a girl, perhaps ten, in a frayed, sloe-blue frock, and a boy around six, naked except for a pair of red underpants, his hair wild like a savage’s – stood by an open gate, engaged in passionate, noisy debate over the terms of their game.

  ‘You be the Queen Snake,’ said the boy, ‘I’ll be the clockodile. And I have to catch you.’ He made snapping gestures with his rigid, tanned arms.

  ‘No, you can be the crocodile, and I’ll be the hunter.’

  ‘No, you can be the clockodile and I’ll be the hunter. No, the tiger!’ The boy began to spin.

  ‘No, I’m the tiger.’ The girl started giggling. ‘And you’re the monkey.’

  ‘No! You’re the monkey and I’m the bunky.’ The boy chuckled like a drunk, whirling.

  ‘There’s no such thing as a bunky!’ The girl tried to grab the spinning boy but he twisted out of her grasp and spun faster. She laughed, piercingly, explosively. ‘Tommy, stop!’

  ‘I’m a monkey, I’m a bunky, I’m a lunky, I’m a tunky,’ round and round and round, and the girl, perhaps his sister, fell crippled with hysterics, suffocating, collapsing in the dust as he danced and danced.

  Delphine watched these strange, thoughtless creatures as she might have watched tribesmen from the Peruvian jungle or Martians, their rituals and their happy, untamed weightlessness utterly opaque to her.

  The girl rolled over and spotted her. For one impossible second, Delphine believed the girl would say, ‘Come, play with us’, and the two children would teach her how to be a snake, a queen, a tiger, a clockodile – the knack of it, the magic.

  The girl’s expression became solemn. She stood and, as if noticing dirt for the first time, brushed down her frock. She looked to the boy.

  ‘Come on, Tommy.’

  She grabbed his little brown hand and led him swaying through the gate.

  Delphine watched the gate click shut. She imagined the rich, vast land beyond. A gust rushed across the village. The trees of Pigg exhaled.

  She had her afternoon planned out:

  i. memorise all genera of the order Chiroptera native to the British Isles, ready for Professor Carmichael’s test

  ii. eat the Mars bar she had wrapped up in her hankie (disguising the action, if necessary, by pretending to blow her nose)

  iii. use her new keys to search the rooms on the east wing first floor for evidence

  iv. help Mr Garforth with his feeding rounds

  As she opened the door to the long library, she heard a whap, like someone hitting a tennis ball. Mr Kung turned to look at her. He was at one of the bookcases, dressed in a crisp suit. He had just slapped a book shut. It sat between his palms. He looked a little like a vicar about to lead the congregation in prayer.

  Delphine felt herself wince under his gaze. Most adults in the house did not see her – she was like a spectre, or a servant – but he was looking straight at her. He smiled and let the book dip. She nodded.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, giving equal weight to the two syllables.

  Delphine nodded again. Mr Kung nodded. She waited for him to turn away, but he continued to stare. She nodded a third time, then, clasping her hands behind her back, walked over to the Nature section. Mr Kung watched. Delphine turned her back and pretended to scan the shelves for A Guide To British Animal Life. She could feel his eyes on her. She felt sure he sensed her anxiety – that, in some horrible way, he was feeding off it.

  She heard footsteps. She froze, then realised they were heading not for her, but the far door. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him exit with quick, purposeful strides, hands behind his back, just like hers. The door clicked shut.

  Her heart was galloping. Had he been holding his hands like that to mock her? She counted to ten, then dashed to where he had been standing. She scanned the shelves for the book he had been reading.

  It took her several sweeps. The spine was dismal grey-brown, and blank. Its dullness worked like camouflage. She took it to the window, where the light was better.

  The book was plain, with no title. The first page had a brown water stain and a signature she could not read. The next couple of pages were blank. On the next, she found the title: Transportation And Its Practice – A Guide By A. Prentice.

  Her shoulders sagged. What had she been expecting? The Opium Smuggler’s Compendium?

  Delphine stood on tiptoes and slid the book back on the shelf. The letter, the channel, the tunnels. The old Earl’s supposed madness. Delphine felt as if she were teetering on the precipice of something.

  As if something dark and hungry were about to burst out of hiding.

  CHAPTER 10

  BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS

  June 1935

  Delphine walked from the powdery dunes down to the hard sand of the beach. Razor clams and whelks crunched beneath her feet. The full moon sat low in a cloudbank, burning.

  She snagged a dry tangle of seaweed with her crab hook and hoisted it high above her head. It hung against the moon like a fright wig, gnats and bluebottles scribbling at its edges. She spun it once, twice, and hurled it back towards the dunes, where it crashed and slewed apart.

  The distant sea was sleek, stippled with milk-bright flakes. Delphine imagined it surging inland, filling the crooked channels of the salt marshes, inundating the woods, flooding the secret chambers beneath the estate and finally seething through the corridors of Alderberen Hall itself, tearing down fine brocade and fittings and portraits, washing conspirators from their beds then receding, dragging the whole rotten edifice with it, leaving only mud – miles of stark, honest mud.

  On the dark sand left by the ebbing tide was a pair of black leather shoes. The beach was empty. She claimed salvage rights.

  She sunk her crab hook into the sand, dragging it behind her as she began a loose circuit of the shoes. They were smart men’s shoes. Indeed, they appeared to have been recently polished. They sat side by side on a folded newspaper.

  Her crab hook scored a spiral winding inward. She stopped.

  The laces we
re clean and black. She picked up the shoes. Apart from a few grains of sand in the stitching around the toe, they were immaculate. The soles looked brand new. It was as if a shoemaker had left his workshop door ajar and, spotting their chance, his latest creations had made a break for the seaside. The surrounding sand was packed into muscular ridges; there were scuffs that might have been footprints, but they petered out after a couple of yards. She was about to pick up the newspaper, imagining it might contain some vital clue, when she noticed a man in a grey suit, standing in the sea.

  The tide was a long way out. She only spotted him because he reached up to steady his bowler hat. After that he stood still, one hand on his hat, the other by his side. He had his back to her. The water was up to his calves. His trousers were not rolled up.

  Delphine watched. The man did not move. He was camouflaged, grey suit against grey sea.

  She put down the shoe, then reached into her bag and retrieved the field glasses she had found lying around at the back of a locked chest of drawers in Dr Lansley’s room. She put the cold metal to her eyes, twisting the eyepieces until the image focused.

  His black hair glistened in the moonlight.

  She watched. He stood, as if waiting. She considered shouting.

  He took a step, wobbled; the slack hand went out for balance. He took another step. He began to walk.

  The water was up to his knees. Delphine knew he would give in and turn back – this early in the summer, the sea was perishing.

  She stood on the flat, wide beach, the full moon blazing. Any moment, he would turn and spot her. He might think she was trying to steal his shoes. The water was up to his backside.