Behind Locked Doors

"Victoria once told me that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell in silence. I wonder what she would say if she knew how many silences I was keeping."

I climbed the grand staircase with leaden steps, at the end of my endurance. This, at least, required no artifice. My body had been running on terror and determination since dawn, and now that I had surrendered the one decision I had been fighting — the constable, they were sending for the constable — the exhaustion crashed over me like a wave breaking against a seawall. Each step required conscious effort. My hand upon the bannister was the only thing keeping me upright.

Behind me, I could feel Victoria watching from the drawing room doorway. I did not turn to confirm it. I knew her well enough to know she would observe my ascent with that particular attention she brought to everything — noting the heaviness of my tread, the angle of my shoulders, the way I gripped the bannister as though the stairs might shift beneath me. She would read the exhaustion as genuine, because it was. And she would assume I was going to my chamber to sleep, because that was what she had told me to do.

"My dear, you are exhausted," she had said. "Let me manage things for a while. You will be no good to anyone if you collapse from want of sleep."

Kindness and calculation in equal measure — the dual nature of most things Victoria did. She needed time alone. Time to observe, to think, to pursue whatever questions my behaviour had planted in her mind. I understood this as clearly as I understood my own need to be free of her gaze, even temporarily.

I reached the upper landing and turned toward my chamber without hesitation. If Victoria was still watching — and she would be — she must see me move in the direction of rest, of obedience, of a wife too spent to do anything but sleep.

My chamber door opened and closed behind me, and I stood in the silence of the room where this nightmare had begun. The bed was made now, Sarah's work, the sheets smoothed and the pillows arranged with tidiness.

I sat upon the edge of the bed. My hands found my lap and lay there, still, whilst my thoughts moved restlessly.

The east wing. Voices at midnight. A thud.

Mrs Holloway's revelation circled through me with the insistent rhythm of a pulse. I had carried it up the stairs, had carried it through Victoria's probing and Thomas's gentle pressure and the terrible moment of capitulating to the constable's summons, and now it sat in my chest like a stone that would not be dislodged.

I knew what was in the east wing. Not everything — I was not fool enough to believe William had shown me everything, confessed everything, revealed every shadow and corner of the life he had built beneath the life we shared — but enough. Enough to know that whatever Mrs Holloway had heard at midnight, whatever argument had ended with a heavy thud, had occurred in a room I had entered only twice before. A room William had shown me with a mixture of pride and apprehension that I had not, at the time, fully understood.

The Blue Room.

I pressed my palms against my thighs and stared at the far wall. I should sleep. My body demanded it. The muscles in my back and legs ached with the morning's exertions — the frantic search, the cellar floor, the stairs climbed and descended again and again. My eyes burned with tears shed and unshed, and a headache was gathering behind my temples with the slow inevitability of a storm.

But the constable was coming. And when he arrived, he would begin to ask questions, and those questions would eventually lead him through the house, through its corridors and wings and unused chambers, and sooner or later he would reach the east wing and the room at its end. And whatever he found there would shape whatever came next.

I needed to see it first.

I rose from the bed and moved to my dressing table. The key was where I had placed it three days ago, after returning from Eleanor's — tucked into the small carved box where I kept hairpins and a cameo brooch my mother had given me before my marriage. A plain iron key, heavy for its size, unremarkable in appearance. William had pressed it into my hand during the confession, his fingers trembling against mine.

"If anything should happen," he had said. "If I should disappear, or if strangers come asking questions you cannot answer — this room. You must see what is there. You must understand."

I had not understood. Not then, not in the chaos of revelation and horror that his confession had unleashed. I had taken the key and hidden it and fled to Eleanor's house, and in the three days I spent there I had not once considered using it. The key had been an abstraction, a token of William's desperation that I could not yet bring myself to face.

Now it sat in my palm, solid and cold, and the time for abstraction had passed.

I listened at the chamber door. The corridor beyond was silent — no footsteps, no voices, no indication that anyone observed this particular stretch of hallway. Victoria would be downstairs. Thomas would be dispatching the messenger to the constabulary. The servants would be occupied with the continued search, the kitchen, the hundred small tasks that kept a household functioning through crisis.

I eased the door open, slipped into the corridor, and turned toward the east wing.

The transition was immediate. The main house — warm, lit, alive with the residual presence of the people who moved through it daily — gave way within a dozen steps to something colder and more still. The east wing corridor stretched before me, its shadows deeper than those in the rooms I knew, the air carrying a chill that had nothing to do with the winter morning and everything to do with disuse. The wallpaper here was simpler — a restrained floral pattern in muted greens and creams — and bare patches upon the walls showed where paintings had been intended but never hung. The gas lamps were unlit, and the only illumination came from the tall windows at intervals along the passage, their pale grey light falling in slabs across the floorboards.

My stockinged feet made almost no sound upon the carpet runner. I had left my shoes beside the bed — a decision born of instinct rather than calculation, though the effect was the same. Silence. If anyone were nearby, they would not hear me coming. And if I needed to move quickly, I could do so without the betraying click of heels upon wood.

The corridor seemed to stretch further than it should, though I knew this was merely the effect of unfamiliarity and fear. I had walked this passage twice before — once with William, once alone — and on both occasions it had seemed longer than the architecture warranted, as though the east wing existed at a slight remove from the rest of the house, subject to different rules of proportion and distance.

I reached the door at the corridor's end. Heavy oak, darker than the others I had passed, its brass handle gleaming with a polish that the other fixtures in this disused wing did not share. Someone — William, presumably — had maintained this door even as the rest of the wing was left to accumulate the fine dust of neglect.

The key turned smoothly in the lock, the mechanism well-oiled, and I pushed the door open.

The Blue Room greeted me with its particular quality of enclosure. The deep azure wallpaper that gave the chamber its name absorbed what little light entered through the heavy drapes, creating an underwater dimness that made the space feel both intimate and vast. The four-poster bed stood against the far wall, its dark mahogany frame carved with the intertwined roses that appeared throughout the manor. A fire had been laid in the grate but not lit, and the air was cold enough that my breath might have misted had I been breathing deeply enough to produce it.

But it was not the bed or the wallpaper or the chill that arrested me in the doorway. It was the room's condition.

Two chairs had been positioned before the fireplace — heavy armchairs that belonged elsewhere in the house, dragged here for the purpose of conversation. One remained upright, though pushed back at an angle that suggested its occupant had risen abruptly. The other lay on its side, toppled with a violence that had left gouges in the floorboards where its legs had scraped across the wood.

Two glasses sat upon the small table between the chairs. Crystal, from the set William kept in his study. One remained upright, its contents barely touched — a finger of whiskey catching the dim light with amber warmth. The other had fallen, or been knocked, and lay on its side at the table's edge. The whiskey it had contained had pooled across the table's surface and dripped onto the bare floorboards below, leaving a dark stain that was still faintly damp to the touch when I knelt beside it.

Recently, then. Last night. The argument Mrs Holloway had heard.

I rose and turned slowly, my eyes adjusting to the dimness, cataloguing the room as William must have left it — or as it had been left after he departed, or was taken, or whatever had happened in this space between midnight and dawn. The glass-fronted cabinet against the far wall stood intact, its contents undisturbed. The obsidian Anubis still gazed outward with those ancient, knowing eyes. The jade dragon coiled on its shelf, patient as stone. The golden mask — that strange, unsettling thing whose features seemed to shift depending on the angle of the light — sat upon its stand with the same expression of ambiguous watchfulness it had worn when William first showed it to me.

"Payment," he had called them, during the confession. The word had confused me then. Payment for what? From whom? He had spoken of arrangements, of debts that could not be repaid in currency, of men who dealt in commodities more precious and more terrible than gold. I had understood only fragments, had grasped at meaning through the fog of his anguish and my own dawning horror. But I understood now, standing in this room with the evidence of his midnight meeting scattered across the floor, that whatever William had been involved in was real and physical and violent. Not merely secrets whispered in studies. Not merely letters sealed in crimson wax. But men in chairs, drinking whiskey, conducting business that ended with overturned furniture and —

I saw the blood.

Not immediately. It did not announce itself. But as I moved around the fallen chair, my gaze tracking across the floorboards beyond the edge of the thick Oriental rug, I found it. A smear upon the wood, dark and dried, perhaps the length of my forearm. Not a pool — not enough for a mortal wound — but enough. Enough to confirm that whatever had occurred here had drawn blood from someone.

Not William's. The thought arrived before I could stop it — desperate, pleading, the kind of prayer one makes without believing in the deity addressed. But I could not know that. Could not tell, from a dried smear upon floorboards, whose veins had opened to produce it. It might have been William's. Might have been the blood of whatever confrontation Mrs Holloway heard at midnight — the argument, the thud, and then this. The evidence that words had not been sufficient to resolve whatever business brought men to this room in the dead of night.

My stomach turned. I gripped the edge of the fallen chair and forced myself to breathe.

Which chair had been William's? The overturned one, with its violence and its gouged floorboards? Or the one that remained upright, pushed back but still standing? Had he been the one who rose in anger, or the one who was thrown? I could not tell. The room offered evidence without explanation, fragments without a story to contain them.

I crouched beside the stain, my fingers hovering above it without quite touching. The blood had dried to a dark rust colour, its edges sharp against the pale wood. Near it, almost invisible in the dimness, I noticed something else — a small tear in the rug's edge, as though something had been dragged across it with force. And beyond that, near the base of the wall, a scuff mark that might have been made by a boot.

A struggle, then. Not merely an argument but a physical confrontation. Mrs Holloway's thud — the sound of a body hitting the floor, perhaps, or a chair being overturned with its occupant still in it.

I stood and pressed my hand against my mouth, breathing through my fingers. The room's collection watched me from its various positions — the Egyptian hieroglyphs on gilded papyrus, framed and hung with the care of a connoisseur. The Chinese silk paintings depicting landscapes of mist-wreathed mountains and coiling dragons, their colours still vivid despite what must have been considerable age. The glass-fronted cabinet with its obsidian Anubis, its jade dragon, its golden mask whose craftsmanship belonged to no tradition I could name.

I had seen these objects before. The first time William brought me here — months ago, before the confession, before everything — I had been genuinely entranced. What woman would not be? These were beautiful, remarkable things, the sort of pieces one might expect to find in the great museums of London or Paris, not in a guest chamber at the far edge of the known world. I had asked him where they had come from, and he had deflected with that particular smile he wore when a subject was to be set aside — a gift from a business associate, he said. Tokens of appreciation from trading partners abroad. I had not pressed further. Had not thought to.

Five days ago, kneeling on the Persian carpet in his study with brandy on his breath and tears on his face, he had told me what they actually were. Payment. Not gifts, not tokens — payment for services rendered. For the supply of men whose lives and freedom had been bartered away to people I could not begin to imagine, through channels I could not begin to trace. Convicts. Men already broken by the system that had transported them to this colony, disappearing into arrangements that William had facilitated for years.

The artefacts were beautiful. They were also evidence. Any person of education who laid eyes upon this collection would immediately ask the question that I had been too trusting — or too comfortable — to ask: how did an ex-convict in Van Diemen's Land come to possess antiquities that would not look out of place in the British Museum? The question led nowhere good. It led to William's past, to his connections, to the true source of the fortune that had built this manor and sustained our life within it. It led to ruin.

This room could not be seen by the constable. Not the artefacts, not the overturned chairs, not the blood. Not any of it.

The doorknob rattled.

The sound was small — brass turning against brass, the mechanism engaging and failing — but in the silence of the Blue Room it struck like a gunshot. I froze where I stood, my hand still extended toward the cabinet, every muscle in my body locking into absolute stillness.

The handle was tried again, more firmly this time. A deliberate pressure, testing the lock. Then silence.

Someone stood on the other side of that door. Someone who wanted entry and had found it barred.

Victoria.

The thought came instantly, bringing with it a wave of ice that flooded from my chest to my extremities. Victoria, who had sent me to rest and then used the time to explore. Victoria, who would have noted the unused wing, the darker corridor, the door at its end. Victoria, who could never resist an unanswered question.

I did not breathe. Did not move. Stood amongst the artefacts and the overturned chairs and the dried blood on the floorboards, and listened.

Silence. Then, faintly, the creak of a floorboard. The rustle of fabric — a riding habit's heavy wool brushing against the wall. She was still there. Still standing at the threshold, considering. I could almost hear her thinking, could almost feel the force of her intelligence pressing against the locked door like a physical weight.

What was she seeing? The brass handle, polished where the surrounding fixtures were not. The scratches around the keyhole — had I left fresh ones? I could not remember whether I had been careful with the key or hasty.

A lifetime passed. Perhaps ten seconds. Perhaps thirty. I could not tell. Time had ceased to function in any meaningful way, had contracted to the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Then footsteps. Soft, measured, retreating. Growing fainter as they moved along the corridor, back toward the main house.

She was leaving. Had tried the door, found it locked, and departed.

I exhaled. The breath left me in a shudder that shook my entire frame, and I gripped the edge of the cabinet to steady myself. The golden mask watched impassively from behind the glass, its shifting expression offering neither comfort nor counsel.

I needed to think. The messenger would reach Hobart Town by early afternoon, perhaps, and the constable would follow — today, tomorrow, whenever the machinery of colonial authority saw fit to respond. But respond it would, and when it did, official eyes would move through this house with a thoroughness that household servants could never match. Victoria would be waiting downstairs, her mind already assembling the fragments of this morning into patterns that pointed toward the truth. And this room — with its overturned chairs, its spilled whiskey, its blood upon the floorboards — existed as evidence of everything I could not afford to have discovered.

I could not remove the artefacts. They were too numerous, too heavy, too conspicuous in their absence if anyone had already noted them. But the chairs could be righted. The glasses could be taken away. The blood —

The blood would need more than a cloth and cold water. It had dried into the grain of the wood. Getting it out would require time and materials I did not currently possess. And even then, the stain might remain, a shadow upon the floorboards that would catch an investigator's eye.

I righted the overturned chair, lifting it carefully to avoid dragging its legs across the floor again. Placed it back in its position before the fireplace. The empty glass I wrapped in my shawl. The other — the one still holding a finger of whiskey — I lifted to my nose first, breathing in the familiar scent of William's preferred spirit. Good whiskey. The kind he kept for guests he wished to impress or business he wished to conclude.

I drank it. The whiskey burned down my throat and hit my empty stomach with a warmth that spread outward through my limbs, steadying hands that had been trembling for hours. I had not eaten since the previous evening, had not drunk anything but cold tea that I could barely swallow. The spirit tasted of oak and smoke and the particular sweetness that William always said marked a well-aged bottle. For a moment — just a moment — I closed my eyes and let the warmth do its work.

Then I wrapped the second glass alongside the first and blotted the spilled whiskey on the table with my handkerchief. The stain upon the floorboards beneath would remain, but it could pass as an old mark. An accident from whenever the room was last used. The blood was another matter. I would need to return. Tonight, perhaps, when the household slept.

I gathered my shawl with its wrapped burden and moved toward the door. From my pocket I drew the key and slid it into the lock, pausing to listen before turning it. The corridor beyond was silent. No footsteps, no breathing, no sense of presence. Victoria had gone. The east wing had settled back into its customary stillness.

I was about to turn the key when something pushed against it from the other side.

The pressure was slight at first — a faint resistance against my fingers, as though the mechanism had stiffened. Then firmer. Deliberate. Metal pressing against metal from beyond the door, and I understood, in a single freezing instant, what was happening.

A second key. Someone was inserting a key from the corridor.

My key shifted in the lock, forced backward by the intrusion, and before I could grip it — before I could do anything at all — it was pushed free of the mechanism entirely. It struck the floorboards at my feet with a sound that seemed, in the silence of the Blue Room, as loud as a church bell. A bright, unmistakable clunk of iron upon wood that announced, to whoever stood on the other side of that door, that someone was inside.

I stared down at the key on the floor. Then up at the lock, where the second key now turned with smooth, purposeful precision.

The mechanism clicked. The handle began to move.