PROLOGUE
Edward Hyde roared in pain.
Pain from his head, pushing from the inside, crushing from the outside. Pain in the dripping red blotch on the white post before him, in the confines of the cage which stopped him from fleeing into the darkness. Pain in his aching fingertips, in the whirl of bloody images in his mind.
Those were the worst.
He saw the young man again. His hands bound above his head, his feet swaying loosely. Dark blood running down his cheeks, dripping onto his sodden shirt and pooling on the floor. Edward saw himself kneeling in that pool and scooping the blood up to let it run between his fingers. He didn’t know whether any of it was real.
More images came in a flurry, and he threw up his arms to ward them off. A man with his front teeth punched out. A wailing child trampled in the street. A bar singer thrown onto a bed, her limbs splayed unnaturally in all directions. An old man with a neat puncture hole in the centre of his forehead, his mouth a wide, surprised O and his hands curled into claws grasping at the life that had already left his body.
Edward couldn’t breathe. The posts around the edge of his circular cage were constricting, pressing upon his lungs. A chill wind stung his skin, and yet there was no air.
There were people out there, too, in the shadows beyond the cage. They were coming closer.
He saw himself leaping up, bursting free from the cage, throwing aside anyone who stood in his way. But what he saw in his mind couldn’t be trusted. He dropped to the ground, whimpering in confusion.
A rising tide of blood washed at his feet. If he remained motionless, it would consume him. He rose and stalked around the edge of the circular platform, knowing there could be no escape.
Then he looked directly upwards. He told himself that what he saw was impossible, but how could he be certain?
It was that same young man who haunted him. Hands tied above his head, feet swaying, shirt sodden with dark blood. His face was streaked with ugly gashes and there were black blotches on his arms and neck.
Blood rained from the mutilated body onto the floor, onto Edward’s face, into his mouth.
His head hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt
He howled and charged the white post with his head lowered, aiming at the precise point that was already stained with his own blood.
CHAPTER 1
Muriel considered all society parties lethally dull, but this one was worse than most. It was just as well that she had something to occupy her mind – otherwise, the anecdotes about Mayfair restaurants, home redecoration and inane gossip relating to anybody not present at the Courtenay residence that evening might have reduced her to a heap on the luxurious carpet, begging to be freed.
As it was, she was focused and determined. She accepted glasses of champagne whenever they were offered, but found hiding places for them after a single sip. She moved effortlessly from group to group, hovering at the periphery of conversation. In the dining room, a collection of wives wearing gowns far more elaborate than Muriel’s remarked on the décor of the house in tones that conveyed admiration, envy and subtle disdain. Whiskered gentlemen populated the library, grunting at one another while inhaling from cigars, and when they did speak it was only the typical remarks about foreign policy and the Marquess of Salisbury’s principle of ‘splendid isolation’, a concept that at this moment struck Muriel as particularly attractive. In the crowded corridor she paused outside the servery, where one maid instructed another that they had “best not scrimp on the gin cocktails – they’re set on being three sheets to the wind tonight.” She made her way into the large garden, where guests gathered in smaller groups, most of them intent on one another rather than paying any attention to the nominal centrepiece of the event: a plinth in the centre of the lawn upon which was a large plaster representation of a grand public building.
She stood alone before the model for several minutes, studying the tall Greek columns before its entrance and the towers at each corner that were as ornate as pagodas. Even though the model was unpainted, it seemed somehow garish, as well as a monstrosity.
“Fine-looking place, wouldn’t you say?”
Muriel nodded doubtfully. Without looking up, she said, “The name needs a bit of work.”
“The name?” the man said. “Does it have a name?”
She gestured at the plaque positioned in front of the model, which read St Simeon’s: Liberating Children from the Grip of Poverty.
Now she turned to see the man she was addressing. He appeared to be in his mid-sixties, and dandruff speckled his pale suit. He wasn’t looking at the plaster model, but rather up at the ivy-laced rear of Simeon Courtenay’s grand townhouse. The glass doors behind the twin balconies of the first floor were protected with geometric-patterned iron trellises. It seemed that their host was conscious of the need for security.
“I was referring to the school,” she said.
The man glanced at the model. “Ah, yes. I suppose it is rather an affectation, old Simeon using his first name like that. But there wasn’t a St Courtenay, as far as I know.”
Muriel smiled. “Did you know that there were three saints named Simeon? All of them were stylites – they lived up on tall pillars, fasting and preaching to people below. Our host may like the idea of being held up above others, but he hardly seems the pious type.”
She told herself she shouldn’t flaunt her knowledge. It was hardly expected of a woman. Then again, neither were critical opinions.
“Still – he arranged for all this, didn’t he?” The man waved vaguely at the model. “If it wasn’t for him setting up the charity, there’d be no school. I mean, in good time…” He drifted off. “Personally, I think we ought to be very proud of ourselves. My name’s Ingram, by the way. Not an insubstantial investor to the scheme, actually. And you are…”
Muriel laughed. “I’m nobody.”
“Then who are you with?”
“Just myself.”
They both turned as one of Simeon Courtenay’s house staff called out, “Ladies, gentlemen, would you be so good as to gather around the model?” He began to harry the groups scattered around the lawn, and Muriel listened attentively, hoping to add names to her list of donors to the charity or, even better, her list of perpetrators of the fraud.
“Mr and Mrs Hines?” the valet said politely to one couple. The Hineses had donated £100 and Muriel’s background research suggested that they were entirely well-intentioned.
“Please move this way,” the valet continued, “and stand just… yes, just there. Now, Captain Wright-Moss, if you would be so good.”
Captain Wright-Moss was of more interest. Earlier at the party Muriel had heard this stiff-looking man remark about a sizeable donation, but she knew for a fact that he was close to bankruptcy. Perhaps he might lead her to information about the gifts from anonymous donors that had been entrusted to the foundation, which hadn’t appeared on any public reports but about which Muriel had heard murmurings during other social events. If only she could get her hands on the statements relating to the building costs…
“Ah, Mr Ingram, Miss Carew,” the valet said brightly as he approached Muriel and her companion, “you’re in just the right place already, thank you so much.”
Muriel winced at the use of her name.
As other guests shuffled into place around them, Mr Ingram whispered, “You are Miss Muriel Carew?”
“I am,” she replied reluctantly.
“My goodness. I saw your name on the list of donors and I was surprised enough to remark to my wife—”
“I had asked for my name to be omitted,” Muriel said, doing nothing to disguise her frustration. “It was only a modest donation.” She resisted the temptation to add: I wouldn’t waste good money
on a scam like this. The amount had been carefully calculated as the minimum that would ensure she would be invited to the party.
Mr Ingram continued, “I said to my wife, look here, that’s General Sir Danvers’ daughter!”
The guests were being encouraged to squeeze closer together as the photographer set up his tripod. Muriel experienced sudden claustrophobia, despite the warm air and the bright blue sky above.
“You knew my father?” she asked, her voice cracking slightly. Then she feigned laughter. “He wasn’t a real general, you know. He had a military bearing and the title just seemed to cling to him, like a nickname.” Conversely, the title ‘Sir’ seemed a downgrading of his status as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords. His precise position in England’s hierarchy had always eluded her.
“Indeed I did. I’m Ingram, of Ingram’s land agents. I performed the purchase of St Stephen’s Vicarage personally.”
The house represented another confusion of titles: in the past, many had assumed Muriel’s father was a man of the cloth, on account of his choice of the old vicarage in Canonbury as home.
She managed a weak smile. “I still live there.”
“I’m so glad to know that you do… despite your position.”
Muriel didn’t reply. The ever-tightening huddle resulted in her neighbour on her other side pressing uncomfortably into her bare shoulder.
“You must have been so very young when your father was taken from us.”
Muriel replied hollowly, “I was nineteen.”
Involuntarily, she thought of a grinning face, an empty house, a sense of the world shifting on its axis. She had been entirely lost that night, even before she had learnt of her father’s death.
“That was a decade ago,” she said, trying to clear her thoughts. “The pain diminishes, or perhaps I should say it crystallises. Either way, it’s smaller and can be worked around.” She had hardly noticed she was speaking aloud. She shook herself and said, “Now, let’s smile for this photograph, otherwise we risk appearing despondent over the building of a new school, which wouldn’t do.”
The valet stepped back but continued gesturing to coax those at the edges of the group inwards. Finally, he signalled that no more could be done, and the photographer disappeared beneath the cloth hood
of his camera and held up a tray containing magnesium flash powder. Muriel gasped at the ignition of the flash, which was far brighter than she had anticipated. One of her neighbour’s responses was even more pronounced, and she turned to see who had made the stifled cry of anguish.
She didn’t gasp a second time. She couldn’t. All the breath had left her body.
The man who had been standing directly behind her hadn’t noticed her, and now he staggered away from the group, a hand pressed firmly to his forehead.
It seemed that the past refused to let her be.
“I’m afraid I must leave you now, Mr Ingram,” Muriel said, patting the land agent’s arm absently. “I’ve just seen a ghost.”
CHAPTER 2
It couldn’t be him, and yet there he stood. When he saw Muriel striding towards him, his hand went to his mouth and his eyes glistened. His face appeared thinner, the skin taut around an unsmiling mouth, and his hair was thinning and streaked with grey.
“Henry!” Muriel said, her right hand outstretched in greeting. This was a technique she used often in awkward situations: she playacted at confidence, which gave her confidence.
He glanced at the doorway to the nearby morning room, then bowed his head and led Muriel to stand beneath the boughs of a tall birch tree.
“You’re… old,” he said in amazement.
Muriel snorted. “And you’re rude.”
“No, I… Apologies. I only meant that you’re very much an adult now. A woman. And, well, a rather fine-looking one.”
“Wasn’t I when you knew me?”
Henry’s stammering didn’t produce any comprehensible words.
It was only now that she noticed that he was clutching the top of a narrow cane, upon which he leant heavily. “Are you unwell, Henry? You’re pale.”
He touched his face lightly in several places, as though it was unfamiliar to him.
In the years since she had last seen him, Muriel had rehearsed what she might say if she encountered him again. Now, none of those preparations seemed of any use, and her calmness surprised her in a not unpleasant way.
“I’m very well, thank you,” he replied stiffly.
“I heard you make an odd sound when the photograph was taken.”
He waved a hand. “My eyes are rather sensitive. The flash disturbed my vision temporarily.” His eyes flicked to the doorway of the morning room.
“You seem distracted, Henry. Am I keeping you from speaking to somebody more interesting?”
A dozen or more people were crammed in the morning room, all orbiting Simeon Courtenay. His greying temples made him appear authoritative, yet his youthful, ruddy features suggested jolliness.
She sighed. “I suppose you’re hoping to conduct a conversation with our host. I take it that you’re a subscriber to his project?”
“Ah – no. I’m a friend of a friend.”
Muriel resisted the temptation to scoff. She had never known Henry to have friends.
“Then it’s a business matter?” she asked lightly.
“Yes.”
“Are you somehow involved in construction?”
“No.” Henry was still looking past her. When Simeon Courtenay moved from one cluster of guests to another, Henry’s body jerked involuntarily.
“Simeon Courtenay is a difficult man to pin down,” Muriel said.
Henry frowned and nodded.
She had once respected Henry, having assumed that men in the higher ranks of society made good decisions almost by default. She knew better now. Almost all of her informal investigations had concluded in revelations of an abuse of power by a man deemed respectable. For example, the textile factory owner who had mistreated one of his house staff, a young woman whose boat fare Muriel had paid in order for her to return home and avoid further beatings. Knowing that the factory owner’s violence would turn towards his remaining staff, she had been compelled to stage the young woman’s disappearance as a suicide, with the intimation that he would be held responsible. Or the lady friend whose father had proved an inveterate gambler. Her son had been forced to take out loans, the value of which had ballooned unreasonably with successive failures to repay, followed by threats of violence. Muriel had discovered that the moneylender had extorted many others in the same way. After months of failing to determine what leverage she might use against the lender, she mounted a letter-writing campaign among her network of influential friends. Each had intimated that they knew the moneylender’s darkest secret – then mentioned the matter of unacceptable extortion almost in passing – and the moneylender soon offered to rein in his greed. Muriel had never discovered what secret he was determined to hide, but was grimly satisfied that her assumption had been sound. All powerful men had secrets. Despite this triumph, the resolution was not a total success: her friend’s father soon returned to his gambling.
“Henry,” she said softly, “I hope that you won’t trust Simeon with your money or your reputation.”
Finally, Henry looked at her directly. “Why do you say that?”
His urgency suggested two possibilities: he was considering a donation, or his scepticism about Simeon Courtenay matched her own. Either way, Muriel decided that it was in her interests to speak candidly. “His project is a sham. Its value is far less than the sum of the donations to date. I doubt the school will ever be completed, and if it is, it will be far smaller than we have been told, aiding far fewer children.”
“Oh.” Henry’s eyes had glazed over again.
“The idea seems no surprise to you. What is your interest in him?”
In the morning room, Simeon Courtenay joined a group at a table. He gave a deep guffaw at some remark, gripping the shoulders of the two
men nearest to him as if his mirth had incapacitated him temporarily. Both of them responded with wide-eyed expressions of gratitude. Muriel noted that Henry’s posture had slackened now that their host was no longer on the move.
“I’m sorry, Muriel,” he said. “My mind is elsewhere.”
“Wasn’t that always the case?” With a wan smile she added, “Of course, back then the distraction was your medical work.”
Henry snapped to alertness. “How long has it been since—”
“It’s been ten years.”
She looked at him in silence, daring him to be the one to refer to the fact that they had been engaged to be married. He didn’t speak.
Lightly, she said, “Where did you go, Henry, all those years ago?” She rarely allowed herself to think of the night she had last seen him: a grinning face, an empty house, a confusion of bodies. Stifling these images was another of her techniques of self-protection.
Henry hesitated, as if weighing up how much the truth might cost him. “I left the country.”
“I thought as much. But my question was about where you went, not what you left behind.” Then she laughed to take the sting from her remark.
Henry only gripped the handle of his cane tight in both hands.
“Then tell me this,” she said. “How long have you been back in London?”
“A little under two years. I presumed that you would not want to be informed of my return. That it might be painful.”
“Emotions tend to diminish over time,” she lied, “and it has been a long time. I find that instead I’m left with questions.”
Henry was staring up at the balconies and trellised windows of the Courtenay house. Then his gaze lowered, and he reached out to take Muriel’s left hand.
“You have no wedding band,” he said. There was pity in his tone.
“That’s because I’m not married.”
“Yes. Muriel, I’m very sorry to hear that.”
She laughed. “It’s not something I’m at all sorry about, myself.”
“But I ruined your fortunes. Or rather, I dashed your hopes. I—”
She squeezed his hand hard enough to make the thumb click. “Stop right there, Henry. You did nothing of the sort. I have chosen not to marry. And don’t forget the capacity in which I am a guest here. My father’s fortune alone would have been enough for me, but over the years I’ve made a series of investments that have proved most sensible, and I have only added to that
starting amount. Among other things, that allows me to indulge in charitable donations – though on the whole I prefer those that are legitimate. This evening I’m indulging a hobby which has become rather an occupation: I am exposing hypocrisy. If that amounts to being ruined then I’d be interested to know what success looks like.”
Henry stared at her. Then, like a spreading fault in a rock struck with a pickaxe, a smile grew upon his face.
“I should have known that you would become such a woman,” he said.
“Because it validates your choosing of me?”
He shook his head vigorously. “You’re the same as you always were. Headstrong, and proud, and…” He trailed off, then thrust a hand into his waistcoat pocket, retrieving a handkerchief and dabbing at his eyes.
“Oh, Henry. I do wish I could say the same about you. What have you been doing since your return? Have you resumed your medical practice?”
“No. That profession was something else I left behind.”
“Then what are you now?”
He only gave a pained smile, as if her question was profound.
In some of her imagined encounters with Henry, Muriel had seen herself beating him with her fists, raging at him for abandoning her so abruptly, and on the very same evening that her father had succumbed to a heart attack. But now her chest only felt tight, and her stomach abruptly empty, and Henry’s doleful expression neutered all of her anger.
His eyes were darting again.
“Muriel… I’m sorry—”
“Well, of course you are—”
“I mean I’m sorry that I must take my leave. It has been a pleasure to see you again.”
Abruptly, he clapped his hands upon both of her shoulders as if she were a man, and then he pushed her rather roughly to one side and hurried – limping slightly and favouring his right leg – towards the door of the morning room, leaving Muriel open-mouthed with her hands on her hips in indignation.
CHAPTER 3
Henry’s movements had the strange appearance of being at once indiscriminate and purposeful. His path through the crowded morning room weaved strangely, as though he were intent on greeting all of his fellow guests – if not for the fact that he didn’t stop to speak to any of them. The situation was as unambiguous as the diagrams of mathematical models that Muriel had studied in the books in her father’s library. Simeon Courtenay was wending his way through the throng of well-wishers who each raised their drink to him in turn, and Henry followed doggedly so that there were never more than half a dozen bodies between them. Yet his pursuit was clever; rather than follow like an arrow, he remained always to one side, at the edges of the room or hemmed between other people who barely acknowledged his presence. Though Henry walked with the assistance of a cane, he was shrewd at navigating the mass of bodies. He darted left and right, at one point bumping into a footman and making his tray of drinks tremble ominously, but then Henry flicked his cane expertly to correct the tray before he slipped past.
Muriel followed him. At first, she attempted to mimic Henry’s manner of movement, but found herself stopped again and again by men and women whose faces she recognised from other parties. Involuntarily, she matched a name to each person, and a corresponding level of complicity in the school construction fraud. She was forced to acknowledge each guest and murmur platitudes, but each time she smiled and slipped away as if to greet other pleasant company. At one point, when a gentlemen took hold of her forearm and exclaimed about the great luck of their meeting, she beamed and pointed over his shoulder, saying, “Ah yes, and have you also met—” and by the time he had turned around again, she had moved on.
In this manner, she and Henry passed into the corridor. Muriel could still make out Simeon Courtenay ahead, bowing to each guest he passed, his shoulders rising as he embraced a fellow or chuckled at a woman’s pleasantry. When he dipped left into the dining room, Henry didn’t follow him inside; instead, he ducked to the right and through the doorway of a cloakroom, which Muriel supposed afforded a line of sight into the dining room without the risk of entering and then being forced to retreat. She could certainly learn some things from Henry that would prove useful when gathering information related to her causes.
It was clear that Henry, like her, was investigating Simeon Courtenay – but why? Was it possible that he had already known about Simeon’s scheme before Muriel mentioned it, and was far ahead of her in bringing him to rights? Something fluttered in her chest: hope. Hope that Henry Jekyll was a good man.
Within a minute, Simeon emerged from the dining room, stepping backwards and gesturing to an occupant of the room with spread palms, chuckling indulgently. When he turned away, though, his face was abruptly expressionless. Muriel recoiled as his eyes found hers. ...
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