The Unseen(63)

She fumbles in her pocket for a match but one blooms in the dark beside her, makes her jump. Robin Durrant leans from behind the orange flare, smiles a little as he proffers it to her. For some reason Cat can’t define, her first instinct is to refuse it. But she accepts, takes a long pull on her cigarette and coughs a little.

‘Thank you,’ she says, guardedly.

‘You’re welcome, Cat,’ he says, and his use of her name sounds too familiar. Cat measures him up in the weak light from the doorway. He moves away slightly, leans against the wall; his body curved into an elegant slouch, hips pushed forwards, head tipped back.

‘What are you doing out here? You’re not even smoking,’ she points out. The yard has come to feel like her place; this afterdinner moment as her time.

‘I was; I was. I finished it just before you came out. Sorry if I scared you,’ he says, turning his head towards her. The contours of his face are softly lit. Clean, smooth brow, eyes lost in shadow. The long sweep of his jaw. His face is beautiful, Cat realises. Quite perfectly beautiful, like a painting of a saint or a representation of love. But also opaque, unreadable. His affability looks like a mask.

‘You didn’t scare me.’

‘No. I bet it would take something to scare you,’ he says. Cat ignores him, takes another long drag. The tip of her cigarette glows fiercely. ‘I hear you’ve been through it a bit. A bit of a firebrand, I hear,’ he says, companionably enough.

‘Who told you that? I thought the vicar’s wife was sworn off gossip.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t dear Hester. But word gets around in small places like this. I should know – I heard myself called “the fairy man” just the other day, by a passing child no more than six years old. Explain to me how she knew to call me that, I beg of you.’

Cat smiles briefly. ‘A little girl with dark brown curls and a turned-up nose, I’ll wager?’ she asks.

‘Oh, indeed – you know the culprit?’

‘Tilly. Daughter of Mrs Lynchcombe who takes in our laundry. I expect Sophie Bell has been filling her in on all your comings and goings, and the child is as sharp as a tack.’

Quite possibly. And yet, it is you I see, loitering behind doors when I am in discussion with the vicar or his wife. Listening hard, to all appearances,’ he says, archly. Cat bridles, turns away from him and does not reply. Above her head, moths dive and flutter at the light in the corridor, bashing the soft dust from their velvet wings. ‘Come now, Cat – you can’t pretend to be shy. You’re not the type.’

‘What do you know of my type? What do you know of me at all?’

‘I rest my case.’ He smiles.

‘You smile too much. People must guess that you’re mocking them,’ she says, blandly.

‘A surprising few,’ Robin concedes. ‘You’re unusual, for a servant, Cat Morley.’

‘How should a servant be? I thought your Society made no distinction between class or race?’

‘Indeed, it does not. But although such distinctions should not exist, perhaps they do nonetheless. Theosophy also teaches that if a person is made to toil or suffer in this life, it is to atone for wrongdoing in a previous life. The universal law and justice of karma.’

‘Yes, I heard you speak of it the other night. I am a servant because I was a murderess in another lifetime, is that it?’ Cat asks, drily.

‘Perhaps,’ Robin grins, pleased to have nettled her.

Cat thinks on this for a moment. ‘Perhaps. ‘Perhaps I was a starving pauper in a past life, but an exceptionally good one, and this is my reward. Perhaps you were a king, but a vile and corrupt one. And this is your punishment.’ She gestures at him – his rumpled hair, his slightly creased clothes. Robin Durrant laughs softly. ‘Karmic justice, you call it? It’s no justice at all,’ she says.

‘Is the Christian way of thinking more just? That a deity should create a human soul and give it just one lifetime to exist, and in that lifetime he may bestow pain and suffering and misfortunes galore, and all of this is meted out for no reason at all? Or only to test that person? What a cruel God that would be!’

‘But how may a soul, in a new body, learn from its past mistakes if it may not be allowed to remember them?’ Cat asks.

‘Well …’ Robin Durrant falters. ‘Well. By following the teachings of theosophy towards a greater understanding of their condition.’

‘That is no answer. You say that to acquire knowledge they must first be in possession of that knowledge? How may a pauper living in the dust of darkest Africa even begin to guess at this grand scheme? There is no more justice in your theory of karma than there is in an arbitrary and unthinking universe.’