The Silent Orphan Read online

  She smiled as the horses nuzzled her, her entire face lighting up. She looked suddenly like a different girl. Gid peered at Martha curiously, then looked again at the horses.

  “They’re so big,” he breathed.

  “Of course they are. They pull the hearse.”

  In the flickering light, their coats seemed to shimmer. They looked down at Gid with enormous, soulful eyes. Gentle eyes.

  “You’re right,” he said throatily. “They’re very beautiful.” Tentatively, he reached out to stroke the nose of the horse closest to him. Martha’s smile widened.

  “I’m glad you like them,” said Martha, her voice gentle now. She handed him the lamp. “You’ll be spending a lot of time together.”

  Gid peered at her curiously, trying to see behind her eyes.

  She nodded to the hay loft. “Best you sleep up there. I put a blanket up there for you earlier. Don’t tell my father.” Then her smile disappearing suddenly, and she slipped from the stables and vanished into the night.

  Chapter 2

  “Wake up, boy!”

  Gid opened his eyes to see one of the twins staring down at him with that infuriating, leering grin on his face. Gid scrambled to his feet, the roof of the hay loft grazing his head.

  “What do you think this is? It’s past six. Planning on sleeping all day, were you?”

  Gid tried to find his voice. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Bring him down here, Able,” bellowed Arthur from the bottom of the hay loft ladder.

  Able grabbed a fistful of Gid’s collar and shoved him towards the ladder.

  Gid stifled a cry of shock and scrambled down the rungs. He peered up at the twins, his heart thudding and his throat dry.

  Arthur gave him a wide unfriendly grin and held out the shovel in his hands. “Stables need mucking out,” he announced. “Get to work.”

  Gid’s stomach grumbled. He was famished, but too afraid to ask for food.

  “And when you’re done,” said Able, “come see us in the cold house.”

  Gid swallowed. “Cold house?”

  Arthur clamped a hand over Gid’s shoulder and pointed through the open door of the stables to a square brick building beside the main house.

  “Right there. The cold house,” his face was suddenly close to Gid’s. “It’s where we store the bodies.” He burst into a laugh at the sight of Gid’s hesitant expression. He turned to his brother. “I think we’ve scared the poor mite.”

  Gid bristled. “I’m not scared,” he said tautly, knowing the tremor in his voice told them otherwise. He lifted his chin. “And I’m not a poor mite.” His stomach groaned again.

  Arthur howled with laughter. He squeezed Gid’s shoulder so tightly it brought a murmur from his throat. “Stables first, poor mite,” he said. “Then we’ll introduce you to the dead.”

  * * *

  Gid’s stomach churned as he shoveled the dung from the stables, using it to line the vegetable garden. Each time he stepped from the barn, his gaze drifted towards the cold house.

  We’ll introduce you to the dead.

  There were bodies inside. Cold, lifeless bodies. He felt a shiver run down his spine.

  Half way through his shovelling, Martha appeared, her face as blank and expressionless as it had been when Gid had arrived at the house.

  “You slept through breakfast,” she told him.

  He looked down, chastened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know, I…” He faded out, acutely aware of how pathetic he sounded.

  Martha dug into her pocket and produced a hunk of bread. “Here. Eat it quickly. I’ll be in trouble if Papa sees.”

  Gid hesitated. He did not want to be responsible for Martha getting in trouble with her father. But he was sure the groaning of his stomach was loud enough to wake those dead bodies lying in the cold room.

  He took the bread and ate quickly, mumbling his thanks.

  Martha planted her hands on her hips and surveyed the vegetable garden. “You’ve put too much dung over the potatoes,” she reported. “They’ll never grow like that.”

  Without waiting for Gid to respond, she turned and disappeared back into the house.

  He finished cleaning the stables and hung the shovel back on its hook beside the door. He ran a hand over the silky black noses of each of the horses. They peered down at him with large, knowing eyes. One leant forward to nuzzle his neck. Gid smiled to himself. How beautiful they were. Somehow, the sight of them managed to calm him.

  Calm him for a fleeting second, at least. Because now the stables were mucked out, he was to have his first encounter with the dead.

  Sucking in his breath, his made his way to the cold house and knocked lightly on the door.

  “The boy’s here!” he heard one of the twins boom. “Wonderful!”

  The door swung open to reveal the two boys standing side by side, wide grins on their faces. Able put a hand to Gid’s shoulder and ushered him inside.

  He felt suddenly cold and sick. Goosebumps exploded over his entire body. He regretted eating that bread roll.

  On the table in front of them lay a woman’s body. Her skin was a strange yellowish colour and her hair spilled out across the table like discarded straw. How old was she? Forty, perhaps? It was difficult to tell. Death, Gid realised, had a sickening way of making everyone look old.

  Able walked him towards the table.

  He felt his heart knocking against his ribs. A part of him couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. Another part of him wanted nothing more than to look away.

  “The woman killed herself,” said Able, close to Gid’s ear. “She hanged herself from the rafters of her own bedroom. See.” With a firm hand, he forced Gid to look at the woman’s neck. The skin was red and torn, rope burn scarring the pale skin. Between the woman’s lips, he could see her tongue was thick and bloated; an odd reddish-purple.

  Gid felt sickness rising in his throat. He swallowed hard, determined not to show how much the sight of her was affecting him.

  Don’t think of it, he told himself. Don’t think of it.

  But the thought was there.

  His mother.

  His poor, long suffering mother.

  After his father had been executed, she had killed herself in this very same way. Gid had come home from the market to find her body swinging beside her bed, her boots dancing inches above the floor.

  He had screamed and run into the street, pounding on their neighbour’s door for help. The police had appeared and taken down the body. Gid had sat in the street with his back to the wall of the house, his head buried in his hands. He couldn’t bear to look at his mother’s lifeless body. He didn’t want to remember her as a colourless corpse.

  Was this what his mother’s body had looked like when the police had cut her down? Was the skin on her neck raw and burned, her neck at this sickeningly unnatural angle? Had her tongue been bulging between her lips the way this woman’s was?

  Gid pushed past Able and raced into the yard, vomiting outside the door of the cold house. He heard the twins explode into wild laughter.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” called one. “You ain’t never seen a dead body before?” He snickered, appearing in the yard and yanking Gid to his feet. “Don’t you worry. You’ll be plenty used to it by the time you’re done here.” He walked him back into the cold house, clapping Gid heavily over the shoulder. “Body needs washing and dressing.”

  Gid swallowed. He managed a nod, though the thought of touching the woman’s colourless skin made the sickness in his stomach intensify.

  “Lucky for you,” said Arthur, winking at Gid, “All the hard work has already been taken care of.”

  “Hard work?” Gid repeated.

  “Aye. All the treating of the body. Taking care of its excretions and the like.” He gave a snort of laughter.

  Gid drew in a long breath, determined not to be sick again.

  Able yanked at the woman’s stained clothes, tearing her patched underskirts from her body and t
ossing them onto the floor. Gid found himself staring at the woman’s bare form. He had never seen what lay beneath a woman’s underskirts before.

  “Come on boy. Are you telling me you ain’t never seen such a thing before?” Able snorted with laughter and shoved Gid closer to the table. “Go on. Take a look. Don’t think she’ll mind.”

  In spite of himself, Gid found his curiosity getting the better of him. He looked up and down at the woman’s pale and foreign body. The skin on her stomach and thighs was puckered and so pale it was almost translucent. Her breasts lolled to the sides of her chests. Grime discoloured her hands and feet. Gid swallowed heavily. Whoever this woman was, he was certain she would not have appreciated being ogled in such away. He pulled his eyes away, suddenly ashamed.

  “We ought to dress her,” he said in a tiny voice. His cheeks were blazing.

  Able dumped a bowl of water onto the table, its contents sloshing down the front of Gid’s trousers. “Wash the body first,” he ordered. “Get rid of all that grime and filth. Family wants her going to her grave like a lady. Never mind that she weren’t nothing but a drunk.”

  Obediently, Gid ran the sponge up and down the woman’s skin, scrubbing gently at the dirt on her arms and legs. When he reached her neck, he stopped, swallowing heavily. Those angry red rope marks seemed to have multiplied. They seemed to have grown larger.

  “Come on, boy,” Able barked. “We ain’t got all day.”

  Gid brought the sponge to the woman’s neck and wiped gently. The marks stayed as fierce and red as ever.

  My poor, long-suffering mother.

  He shoved the thought away.

  With the body as clean as he was sure he could make it, Gid turned to the pile of clothing the twins had set beside the body. He stared in bewilderment at the unfamiliar garments.

  Able tossed him a thin cotton smock. “Shift and stockings first. Then her underskirts. Then the black dress.”

  As carefully as possible, Gid wrangled the stiff body into her clothes. Able and Arthur watched from the other side of the cold room, smirks on their faces as they watched him try and negotiate the corpse’s weight. Gid didn’t look at them. Didn’t dare ask for help. He focused instead on making sure the woman looked as neat and presentable as possible. He turned up the collar of her dress, doing his best to hide the rope burn. This woman, he was determined, would go to her grave looking like a lady, just as her family had wished.

  Had his mother gone to her grave looking like a lady? At her burial, he had seen nothing but her casket, for which he had been grateful at the time. But now he felt an ache of guilt. He had been his mother’s last living relative. He ought to have been the one to ask that she be cleaned and dressed and be made presentable before she was sent down into the earth. He swallowed heavily, blinking back a sudden sting of tears.

  When he had finished dressing the woman, he stepped back from the table and glanced at Able and Arthur. One gave a satisfied nod. They grabbed the woman’s body and dumped her unceremoniously into the waiting coffin. Arthur pulled the lid closed and the body was gone from sight.

  * * *

  Gid lay awake that night, staring into the darkness. In the stables below him, he could hear Midnight and Shadow breathing softly. Outside the stable, an owl gave a pale cry.

  Each time he closed his eyes, the image of the dead woman returned. In his mind, Gid saw the vicious red marks at her neck, saw the hideous bulge of her tongue. A fresh wave of sickness welled up inside him and he choked it down hurriedly.

  It was late in the night when he finally managed to drift into a restless sleep. And there in his dream was the coffin, the lid opened, revealing the woman’s body.

  Gid watched from across the bare white room, his eyes straining to make out the figure inside. Despite his best intentions, he felt himself moving towards the coffin. It felt as though his legs were moving on their own accord.

  He reached the coffin and looked down at the body. There was the red scar, the broken neck. There was that horrid, bulging tongue.

  But the woman in the coffin was no stranger. This was not the drunkard he had dressed that day to look like a lady. The woman in the coffin was his mother.

  Red scar.

  Broken neck.

  Horrid, bulging tongue.

  “Mama,” Gid heard himself whisper.

  The woman’s eyes flew open. “Gideon,” she murmured.

  Gid yanked himself from sleep and sat, his heart thudding wildly. Cold sweat prickled his skin. “Mama,” he heard himself say. His voice disappeared into the silence.

  He hugged his knees, gulping down his breath.

  It’s just a dream. Nothing more.

  But was it just a dream? Or had his mother’s body truly looked as tortured as the body he had dressed that day? Gid knew it was likely. His mother had hanged herself, just as the woman in the casket had. She too would have lay in a casket with her neck burnt from the rope, her purple tongue pushing between her lips.

  It didn’t matter now, Gid told himself. His mother was gone. She had been gone for more than two years. Perhaps her neck had been burnt and her skin had been red and raw. But she was suffering no longer. She was still and silent in her grave, disappearing into the same damp earth as his criminal of a father.

  Chapter 3

  On the second floor of Haverstock House, Abigail Gresham sat on the edge of her mother’s bed. Mama’s hand felt skeletal in hers.

  “You know this is all your father’s fault, don’t you?” Christine Gresham murmured, her voice icy, despite its thinness.

  “Yes Mama.” Abigail shifted on the bed. She had heard it all before.

  “How could he just go and die on me?” Christine demanded. “How could he leave me to raise you all on my own? Not to mention run the board of this cursed company,” Christine sighed loudly. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is for a woman to make her own way in this world? How was I to run a business and raise a child all on my own? Little wonder I’ve spent half my life ill.” To accentuate her point, she broke into a sudden fit of coughing.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” Abigail murmured, not sure what else to say.

  Her mother let out another enormous sigh. “Oh Abi, it’s not your fault,” she said, in a voice that suggested to Abigail that it very much was.

  She had no memories of her father. Matthew Gresham had died when she was not even two years old, leaving his wife to oversee the running of the import and export company he had spent his life building.

  Eleven years later, Abigail’s mother was still racked with bitterness over his untimely death, blaming her string of health problems on the stress of his passing.

  Abigail could barely remember a time when her mother had not been ill. For almost her entire life, there had been doctors traipsing through Haverstock House, various medicines and herbal tinctures cluttering the shelves, coughing and sneezing echoing through the passages.

  But this time felt different. This time there was blood on her mother’s handkerchief and cloudiness in her eyes. Abigail felt sure her mother would not climb from this bed again.

  The thought made her stomach tighten and tears seize her throat. For all her mother’s sighs and complaints, Abigail loved her dearly. Her mother had been fierce and strong. Despite her precarious position as a wealthy widow, she had not let men traipse over her. The thought of living without her was unbearable.

  Christine turned her head on the pillow so she could look through the window at the heath beyond. The last of the sun was fading and long shadows fell over the trees.

  “You must make sure I’m truly dead,” she told Abigail suddenly. “When they put me in that coffin. You must make sure I’m really gone. I couldn’t bear to be buried alive.”

  Abigail nodded. She had heard this from her mother almost as often as she had heard the rant about her selfish father. “You’ll not be buried alive, Mama,” she promised. “That’s why there are bells on the coffins. If you get put in there alive, you just pull on t
hat string and ring the bell and you’ll be brought straight out.”

  Christine murmured noncommittally. “That’s what your father used to say. I said, what would happen if I were too weak to pull the string. What if the strain of being trapped alive in the coffin were too much and I weren’t able to even lift a finger?”

  Abigail nodded again, “I know, Mama. But I’ll make sure they don’t put you in the coffin while you’re still alive.”

  Christine gave a weak smile. “You’re a good girl,” she snatched Abigail’s arm with a sudden ferocity. “Listen to me,” she said, her voice a sharp whisper. She tugged her closer. “You’re to promise me you’ll never let any man control your life. Do you understand me, Abi?”

  She nodded, swallowing heavily.

  “Men will take from us at will,” she said. “They will take and take until there is nothing left. You must never let that happen to you.”

  Abigail nodded, the lump in her throat intensifying. She didn’t want her mother to die. She didn’t want to be left alone with men who would take and take until there was nothing left.

  “Men will use you,” Christine continued. “They will try to take advantage of you. Especially a beautiful girl like you.” She reached up to tuck a stray strand of blonde hair behind Abigail’s ear. “And so you must do the same to them. Never let them have the upper hand. Never let them have the power.”

  Abigail nodded.

  Christine took her chin in her hand. “Tell me you understand, Abi. Tell me you will never let a man have power over you.”

  “I understand, Mama,” Abigail’s voice was husky. “I will never let a man have power over me.”

  Christine planted her hand back over her daughter’s. “That’s my girl.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll not be buried alive,” she said again. “You can’t let them bury me alive.”

  Abigail swallowed. “No, Mama. I’ll not let them bury you alive. I promise.”

  She shuffled onto the mattress and pressed her body against her mother’s. Lay motionless beside her until the room was dark and Christine Gresham’s body was no longer rising and falling with laboured breath.