The Net of Steel by Fiona Buckley

Author:Fiona Buckley [Buckley, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2023-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The Outrageous Bait

However it had been done, Gladys was gone. Brockley went to Guildford and arranged for her disappearance to be cried in its streets; we visited the Blakes and also my friends Christina and Thomas Ferris at White Towers and asked if they could help, or if they had heard or seen anything that might concern Gladys. No one responded to our crier, and neither the Ferrises nor the Blakes had any useful news for us. The Ferrises reported – which was a relief – that they had not themselves suffered any form of attack, but as for word of Gladys, there was just a blank. Our neighbours were sympathetic up to a point, but there wasn’t much real sympathy for Gladys. The Blakes had met her while Harry was courting Eleanor, and been disconcerted by her, while even Thomas Ferris, a hard-headed man if ever there was one, regarded Gladys as a witch and wondered why I kept her about my household.

The only person among them all who really seemed to understand was Eleanor’s younger sister Margaret, who said, ‘But she’s so old. She must feel that this is too much, that she has nothing to fight with. An old woman can’t go saving herself by climbing out of windows, or running away. She must be so frightened, just longing for home.’ Margaret was a nice girl, I thought.

Meanwhile, in that ruthless way it has, life went on. I might cry myself to sleep at night; in the daytime I might fret about Gladys to everyone who spoke to me, but life still went on. It always does. Tragic things happen. People may fall ill, be injured, die, vanish, but meals must be prepared and eaten, bedlinen changed; people need to eat, sleep, wash, buy provisions; night follows day and day follows night in relentless procession. First of all, Gladys had been missing for several hours, then it became since yesterday, then since the day before yesterday. Eventually, it would be a week, a fortnight, a month …

That the Mercers were behind this, I had no doubt. Their horrible scheme was closing in on me and I wondered how I could live with so much fear, continually in dread of what horrible thing was going to happen next. And yet, I did just that. I lived with it, doing from day to day whatever needed to be done. I wondered how I could seem so outwardly stolid and the answer, of course, was that I wasn’t stolid at all, but food must be cooked and eaten, rooms must be dusted, one must wash, dress, eat, sleep … it was all quite impossible, but I did it just the same.

Once Brockley said to me, ‘Madam, you could take refuge at court, you know. The queen would shelter you.’

‘While I closed Hawkswood and took you all to court with me? Including the stud? Can you imagine? No.’ I shook my head. ‘There’s no escape that way.’

Gladys had vanished on Friday the fourteenth of September.

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