The Crimson Rooms - Hardcover

McMahon, Katharine

3.59

1,531 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399156224 ISBN 13: 9780399156229

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 2010

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In the spirit of Sarah Waters and Geraldine Brooks, a dramatic mystery about love, secrets, and discovery in post-World War I London.

Still haunted by the death of her only brother, James, in the Great War, Evelyn Gifford is completely unprepared when a young nurse and her six-year-old son appear on the Giffords' doorstep one night. The child, the nurse claims, is James's, conceived in a battlefield hospital. The grief-stricken Giffords take them both in; but Evelyn, a struggling attorney, must now support her entire family—at a time when work for women lawyers is almost nonexistent.

Suddenly a new case falls in Evelyn's lap: Seemingly hopeless, it's been abandoned by her male coworkers. The accused—a veteran charged with murdering his young wife—is almost certain to die on the gallows.... And yet, Evelyn believes he is truly innocent, just as she suspects there may be more to the story of her "nephew" than meets the eye...

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About the Author:

Katharine McMahon is the author of The Alchemist's Daughter. A former English teacher, writing instructor, and actress, she lives in Hertfordshire, England.

May 1924, London

I followed my brother across a plateau where a bitter wind howled and the sky flashed. A sudden glare revealed churned earth and a monstrous coil of metal. My brother marched ahead, immaculate in his cap and pressed uniform. I tried to keep up but floundered thigh-deep in mud. Though I thrashed and scrabbled, there was nothing to hold on to, neither root nor rock.

At last I wrenched a foot free but James was now yards ahead, far beyond my reach. I clutched at my thigh with both hands and hauled until it was released and I could crawl forward. The front of my nightgown was a sheet of freezing sludge.

“Jamie.”

He trod lightly, springing from one dry patch to another. The sky flickered again, and this time I saw a man fallen like a puppet on the wire, back arched, legs splayed. And in the next fl ash there was another boy, perhaps fifty yards ahead, waving. Tears made runnels down his filthy cheeks, his mouth gaped, and the lower half of his body was a mash of blood and bone.

I faltered again. “James,” I cried, through lips clogged with mud, “come back,” but he didn’t hear me. His arms were extended toward the boy.

The sky roared. Above a shudder of gunfire came the earsplitting whizz and crack of a shell. I yelled again, “James,” but my voice was drowned by an explosion that swiped my brother off his feet, plucked him upward, and crucified him against a violent fl are of light.

He thumped back to earth.

Silence.

He was facedown, one arm torn away at the shoulder. When he raised his head, I saw that the side of his face had been blown off and an eyeball dangled by a thread in the space where his right cheek should have been.

He looked at me with his good eye, a chip of ice.

“It’s me, Jamie. Don’t you know me?”

The eye went on staring.

“I’ll be there in a minute, Jamie. One minute. Please wait . . .”

The mud held me fast and the night thundered again. If only I could reach him, hold his face to my breast. Then he would be covered up and made warm, healed. In a shattering racket of shellfire I fought the grip of mud that dragged me deeper, deeper, away from James, and filled my mouth, nostrils, and eyes.

Another pause, this time prolonged. I was hot, breathless, shaking, my eyelashes wet. Moonlight shone through the thin bedroom curtains. My skirt and jacket hung ghostly on the wardrobe door, my heap of underclothes shimmered.

From two floors down came a knock on the front door.

I fumbled for my watch, carried it to the window, found it was two thirty-five. Though I yearned to be back inside the dream—this time I had so nearly reached my brother—already my hands were struggling with the sleeves of my dressing gown, my feet had pushed into their slippers.

The landing was quiet. Thank heavens nobody else had heard the knocking, no sign even of Prudence, jowls aquiver, hairnet remorselessly pinned to thinning hair. Stairs groaned under my bare feet. My hand, still trembling from the dream, skimmed the banister; and my heel caught on the last stair rod. In the hall the trapped smells of the house fl uttered like moths: dinners, rose water, endurance.

Knock, knock, knock-knock. “Oh, please be quiet,” I muttered. A seepage of yellow from the lamp outside oozed through the fanlight and fell across the hats on the hall stand—James’s boater, Father’s trilby—and the silvery haze of looking glass. I grasped the latch, my jaw tightened to conceal whatever emotion, other than outrage (surely permissible in the circumstances), might be thrust upon me.

A child of about six stood on the doorstep under the spread beams of light, his face upturned; a neat, rectangular brow, shadowed eyes, lower lip drooping with sleeplessness. My body sagged so that I clung to the doorframe for support. Dear God, James, stepped from my dream, whole, a child again. In a moment his clenched fist would unfurl to reveal the best, the shiniest, the weightiest marble.

My voice was a thread. “No. No, it can’t be.”

“Forgive us if we woke you,” came a voice from farther down the steps and dimly I registered a transatlantic twang. “Evelyn, is it? I would have known you anywhere. You are so like your brother and he described you so fondly, your hair especially.”

A woman’s head appeared level with the child’s shoulder, her face bony and neat-featured, with a pointed chin. Despite her confident words she seemed high-strung as a cat; the sinews in her neck were taut and her eyes too wide-open. Extending a small, gloved hand, she said: “I’m Meredith

Duffy, and this is my boy Edmund. Perhaps we should not have woken you but the boat got in very late and though I thought of looking for a hotel, in the end I decided to come right on here.”

I stared at the exhausted boy, who swayed slightly. “James,” I murmured. “Jamie.”

“Yes, he really is so like his father, it’s uncanny. I’m hoping that you might have some photographs of James when he was a child so we can compare father and son at the same age.” She took yet another step toward me and I noted a trim ankle beneath a daring hemline. Behind her on the pavement was a collection of neat though shabby traveling bags. “Oh, this isn’t all,” she exclaimed, “I have another trunk and assorted boxes, I’m afraid, but we couldn’t manage them in the cab. They’ll send them on tomorrow morning.”

Mother and child were like a tide coming in over the steps and across the threshold. “I absolutely do not understand,” I said.

The woman gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “Don’t say you never got my letter. Oh, the post from Canada is so unreliable. I expect it will arrive tomorrow, just when we don’t need it. No wonder you’re surprised to see me. I must admit I was puzzled that nobody was there to meet us off the boat, but now I understand completely.”

“But don’t you see,” I said, still blocking the way, “I have no idea who you are.”

She frowned. “But you must. I’m Meredith and Edmund here is my son, your brother’s child.”

The boy’s prominent eyes were fixed on my face, occasionally losing focus as his eyelids fluttered. Brown knees stuck out from beneath flannel shorts: my brother, at precisely the height when, if I knelt, his head was level with mine as he gripped me with monkey arms and legs. We used to call it a cling. But here, on the step, in the small hours of Monday, May 19, 1924, with the dream of the real James still fresh, this other child was unreachably out of time.

“I didn’t know James had a son,” I said.

“Well, surely you must have done. Unless . . . don’t tell me your father kept it from you all this while.”

“My father died last year.” The boy’s hair, I noted, sprouted up at the crown in a backward quiff; his lower lip was moist and full.

“Ah, that explains a great deal. I’m sorry. I would so like Edmund to have known his grandpa. But listen, I must get this child to bed. We don’t mind where we sleep,” Meredith was saying. “After the ship we’re just so grateful not to be afloat, on waves. A sofa and a blanket would do.”

Surrendering, I leaned forward to take the child’s hand—I knew that it would feel warm and a little sticky in mine—but he hung his head and held back, so instead I picked up the luggage. Now I was terrified lest he disappear, but mother and child came tripping into the house hand in hand, she with just her little purse hanging from a chain over her shoulder while I struggled with a cluster of bags. “We must be very quiet,” I whispered. “I don’t want anyone else to be woken.”

We crept upstairs, past James’s hat and blazer on the hall stand, the urn of dried flowers on the half-landing, the sleepers on the first floor and the gallery of Victorian Giffords above the dado, to my own landing, where the door to James’s bedroom was kept tight shut, but in the spare room next door, where a couple of empty beds lay flat as boards covered by camberwick bedspreads. I took armfuls of mothball-smelling blankets from a linen chest and starched sheets from the airing cupboard, but when we set to work I was put to shame: Meredith was an expert bed-maker, who could create angular corners and shake a pillow dead-center in its case first time, whereas I hadn’t made a bed since Girton.

I showed them the bathroom but told them not to flush the lavatory at this hour. Meredith only gave me a preoccupied smile and it was clear that I was now expendable. She was lifting the child’s shirt over his head; I glimpsed pale, smooth skin, the little disks of nipple and navel, the fragile collarbone. My boy, how I would have kissed him between neck and shoulder.

They ought to be fed, I realized, and crept down to the kitchen for something suitable. A hot drink was impossible, as it would mean relighting the stove, beyond me at the best of times. In the end I took up cold milk and cookies; by the time I’d climbed three flights of stairs, there was no light under their door—they must already be asleep—so I went back to bed and lay, picturing the boy tucked up under the white sheet, his palm beneath his cheek. In a little while he would turn onto his back and throw his arm across the pillow.

The house seemed to sag under the weight of these new arrivals. Rigid as an effi y, I relived the last half-hour: the dream of James, the child on the doorstep, James’s child. As dawn thinned the darkness, I tried to work it out. James had written regularly, right u...

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