big house. A high wind howled around its turrets and gables, slamming the loose shutters on their hinges. All the windows were dark, except for the last room on the upper floor.
There, in the master bedroom, a single candle guttered and flickered on the mantelpiece, casting monstrous shadows around the vast room. Wind howled down the chimney, rattling the dead embers in the grate. Two figures sat in chairs drawn up beside the fireplace, though the fire had died hours ago, when the last of the coal ran out. A woman stitched her embroidery, while a young man pretended to read a book by the meagre light. It had been opened on the same page for the last fifteen minutes.
The woman gave a little cry. Her son looked up.
‘Are you all right, Mother?’
She sucked blood from her finger. ‘It’s so hard to see in this light, Francis.’
Alice Leighton – once Alice Grenville, later Alice Courtney – looked at her son, touched by the concern on his face. Not yet eighteen, his body was fully grown, big and strong. But there was a softness in his heart that made her worry for his future out there in the wide and wicked world. His jet-black hair framed a handsome face with smooth amber skin and lustrous dark eyes. A rebellious black forelock curled over his forehead, almost touching his left eyelid. She’d seen the way the girls in the village looked at him. It was the same way she’d looked at his father, once upon a time.
The shutters flapped and banged, like the devil himself hammering on the door. Francis closed his book, and rummaged in the grate with the poker. All he stirred was ashes.
‘Do you know where Father is?’
His father – his stepfather, technically, though the only one he’d known – had spent most of the last week locked in the library, going through papers he would not let them see. The one time Francis had tried to go in to him, Sir Walter had cursed him and slammed the door.
Alice put down her embroidery. Her dark hair was streaked with premature grey, her eyes sunken, her grey skin drawn tight across her cheeks. Francis still remembered when she’d been beautiful and gay. His earliest memories were like that: his mother returning from some ball or party, coming into his nursery to kiss him goodnight, her skin radiant and her eyes sparkling. He could almost smell the scent of her perfume as she leaned over his bed, her peach-soft skin against his cheek and the diamonds glittering at her throat in the candlelight. The diamonds had been the first to go.
A bang echoed through the empty house, shivering the floorboards and making the coals rattle in the grate. Francis leaped to his feet.
‘Was that thunder?’ said Alice uncertainly.
He shook his head. ‘Nor the shutters, either. It came from downstairs.’
He went down the long gallery and descended the great staircase. Wax dribbled from the candle and scalded his fingers: there were no silver candlesticks in High Weald any longer. He paused at the foot of the stairs and sniffed the air. He knew the smell of gun smoke well enough from game shooting, and watching the local militia at drill, but he’d never smelled it in the house before.
Dread rose in his chest, and his heart began to pound. He hurried crossed the hall to the library door. ‘Father?’ he called. ‘Father is all well with you?’
The only answer was the rattle of rain on the windows. He tried the door handle, but it was locked. He knelt, and put his eye to the keyhole. The stub of a key in the lock blocked any view inside.
‘Father?’ he tried again, louder this time. His father had been drinking almost without pause these last two weeks. Perhaps he’d lost consciousness.
Putting the candle aside, he reached in his pocket for his penknife and opened the blade. Then he pushed it gently into the key hole and fiddled the key, until he heard it drop on the floor inside. The old door had a good inch gap beneath it. He found a riding crop hanging on the hat rack in the corner of the hallway. Reaching with the tip of it under the door he was able to slide out the key.
He unlocked the door and opened it. The candle pushed back the shadows as he advanced across the long room. As a child, he could remember sliding across the polished floorboards. Now they were rough and splintered; they hadn’t been polished in many years. Empty bookcases lined the walls; the books had been sold like nearly everything else. He could see shadows on the plaster where shields and swords had once displayed the proud crest of arms and armorials of the Courtneys. Like the silver and cut glass, all of it had been sold.
At the far end of the room stood an old oak table, covered with papers and an open bottle of wine. No glasses or decanter. His father lay slumped in the chair behind it, as if he’d fallen asleep. A dark red pool spread across the papers.
Francis paused. Then, all in a rush, he ran to the figure and threw him back in the chair. Stronger than he’d intended: the chair tipped over and fell. His father sprawled backwards and crashed onto the floor, one arm outstretched towards the pistol that lay nearby.
Francis fought back the nausea that rose in his throat. ‘Father?’
Sir Walter Leighton had been handsome, once, before his addictions ruined him. Even in death, his face still bore a trace of that irresistible energy Francis remembered so well; the man who would fling him into the air as a boy and catch him, who would bet him a guinea to jump a fence on his horse, or propose a sudden trip to London. Now his lifeless blue eyes stared up at Francis, as if pleading for forgiveness. From the front, he looked completely untouched. Only further back could you see the edges of the jagged, bloody wound where the pistol ball had blown his brain out through the back of his head.
A short, shrill scream sounded behind him. He spun around to face it. Alice was standing there, her hands raised to her mouth, staring at the body on the floor.
‘I told you to wait upstairs,’ said Francis, horrified that she should have to see this. He ran and wrapped his arms around her, holding her face to his shoulder to block the sight.
She sobbed into his shirt. ‘Why did he do it?’
Francis steered her to one of the leather wingback chairs and made her sit down, where the desk top hid the body from her. She pulled her shawl tight around her, and didn’t try to follow when he went back to the table.
Francis grabbed the topmost paper from the pile and held it up to the light. It was a letter from a solicitor, a firm in London he’d never heard of. He read through the orotund legal phrases, struggling to understand. One paragraph leaped out at him.
If you fail to discharge these debts by midnight on the nineteenth of October, I shall have no alternative but to send bailiffs to seize the said property, including all fixtures and furnishings, in satisfaction of the same.
‘They are speaking about High Weald,’ Francis realized. ‘That’s tonight.’ He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was later than he’d thought. The steeple bell in the little chapel on the hill would already have struck eleven, though he hadn’t heard it over the storm. Horror dawned on him. ‘They’ll be here within the hour.’
He looked down again at his father’s corpse. Anger rose inside him, driving out the sorrow he’d felt. It had been so long, he couldn’t remember when he first realized his father was a compulsive gambler. The way silver disappeared from the chest without explanation, only to reappear equally mysteriously some months later. The card parties in the drawing room he was never allowed to enter, that went on so late he could hear them still going when he woke the next morning. His stepfather’s
