Flay alone knew the grizzly truth about the secret death of his master, Lord Sepulchrave, and of his enemy the gross Swelter whom he had killed. This knowledge he had never divulged.
But his own banishment had been the result of Steerpike’s gesture of disloyalty to his mad master, when the skewbald man was a youth of seventeen or eighteen years, and this disloyalty had remained rooted in Flay’s mind. But of the incarceration and death of the Twins he knew nothing, although, witless of its origins and significance, he had heard their terrible laughter as they died in the hollow halls.
He had strained his brain and memory, as had the Doctor and the Countess, to draw some significant conclusion from the common deaths by fire of the father and son – Sourdust and Barquentine – and from the fact that Steerpike had been the hero of both occasions. Try as they would they were unable to rationalize their suspicions.
And yet there were, over the course of the years, small concrete although disconnected reasons for apprehension. As yet they fitted into no pattern, but they were there, and they were not forgotten.
The Doctor had always been anxious to discover Steerpike’s reason for leaving his service and establishing himself as confidant and retainer of the vacant Twins. His was no mind to find pleasure in such surroundings. His only reason must have been for social advancement or for some darker motive. The identical Twins had disappeared. Their note which Steerpike had found on their table had told of their intention to kill themselves. Prunesquallor had got hold of this note and compared its calligraphy with a letter Irma had once received from them. He compared them in mirrors – he devoted an entire evening to their scrutiny. It seemed that they were by the same hand, the formation of letters big and round and uncertain as a child’s.
But the Doctor had known these retarded women for many years and he did not believe, for all the oddness of their thwarted natures, that they would ever take their own lives.
Nor did the Countess believe that they were capable of making an end to themselves. Their puerile ambition and vanity – and their only too obvious longing to assume, one day, the rôles in which they were always seeing themselves, the rôles of ladies, great and splendid, bedecked with jewels, precluded any such idea as suicide. But there was no proof either way.
The Doctor had told the Countess of Steerpike’s delirious cry ‘And the twins will make it five!’ She had stared out of the window of her room.
‘Five what?’ she had said.
‘Exactly,’ said the Doctor. ‘Five what?’
‘Five enigmas,’ she answered heavily, without a change of expression.
‘And what are they, your ladyship? Do you mean five …?’
She interrupted him heavily. ‘The Earl, my husband,’ she said. ‘Vanished. One. His sisters, vanished: two. Swelter, vanished: three. Sourdust and Barquentine, burned: five …’
‘But the deaths of Sourdust and Barquentine were hardly enigmatic …’
‘One wouldn’t be. Two would,’ said the Countess. ‘And the youth at them both.’
‘The youth?’ queried the Doctor.
‘Steerpike,’ said the Countess.
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor, ‘we have the same fears.’
‘We have,’ said the Countess. ‘I am waiting.’
The Doctor thought of Fuchsia’s poem:
‘But your ladyship,’ he said – she was still staring through the window. The words “And the Twins will make it five” suggest to me that their ladyships Cora and Clarice would make two of the group he had in his delirious mind. He was making a list of individuals, in his fever, I will stake my brightest penny.’
‘And so …’
‘And so, your ladyship, the deaths and disappearances would be six, not five.’
‘Who knows?’ said the Countess. ‘It is too early. Give him rope. We have no proof. But by the black tap-root of the very castle, if my fear is founded, the towers themselves will sicken at his death: the oldest stones will spew.’
Her heavy face flushed. She lowered her hand into a wide pocket, and drawing forth some grain she extended her arm. A small mottled bird appeared out of nowhere and running along her outstretched arm, perched with its claws about her index finger and with a sideways movement began to peck from her palm.
FIFTY-FIVE
‘But he can’t help giving you your ritual for each day, can he?’ said Fuchsia. ‘And instructing you. It’s not his fault, it’s the law. Father had to do it when he was alive – and
‘I hate him,’ said Titus.
