Just as Odette had play-acted with Cecilia. She was wrong about the poison, but the ghost had been telling the truth.
Oh, her heart is breaking. It is an agony, the death lived over again, as though the ghost of her mother has reached inside her chest and squeezed her heart.
The cold hand traces along her cheek.
Her mother’s face is all but skull now. There are shadows at her cheeks, in the hollows of her eyes. The rot pulls back the lips from her teeth, wears away her nose.
She looks so sad.
Odette’s soft mother is gone, and all that remains is grief and rage and anger.
‘She killed us,’ she whispers, her voice coming from inside Odette’s own mind. ‘She took it all. She cannot live.’
‘You didn’t have to do it,’ says Odette, one final plea. ‘No one was asking you to give up your life to care for her.’
‘She would have kept both George and me prisoner. Who else would be expected to do it but her spinster of a sister? She made my whole life a trap, then closed it around me.’ Claudine shakes her head. ‘She is better off dead. I don’t regret it.’
Sorrow turns to anger like a match to oil.
So be it.
Odette swings up with the broken frame, aiming the jagged wood at Claudine’s head.
Claudine shrieks, skitters back. Odette swings again.
A life for a life.
Odette’s is already over. She will make the tally even.
‘Yes, darling. Only I ever loved you. Do not let me be forgotten.’
They dance around the room, Odette throwing her whole weight behind the frame, Claudine stumbling back, in shock, then fury.
Odette lifts the makeshift cudgel, but Claudine lunges first, and Odette only sidesteps at the last moment.
Panting, chaotic, they dart and strike, unsuited to their sport but unable to retreat now. Odette’s shoulders ache – she is clumsy and desperate. Her mother is at her back, arms braced against hers, lifting the wood and swinging it again.
Claudine comes to meet her, grappling with the weapon, herface wild and resembling her dead mother’s far, far too closely. Now they back up against the window, neither one with room to manoeuvre. It looks down onto the long drop, the hard ground far below.
Odette thinks of Leo pressed up against her, the last few moments of his life, his beating heart, felt on her own skin.
Odette could do it.
Claudine would not see it coming.
Sideways, through the windowpane – a fall. The glass would break easily, she thinks, and it would only take tipping her own weight to bring Claudine down with her.
‘Do it, do it now.’ The voice is jagged and cracked, like something dragged from the deep. ‘We can be together then. Please. I am so lonely; you are all I ever had.’
Odette braces herself against Claudine’s body, digs her heels in ready to fling her weight.
Then comes the thought: her mother would not ask her to die for this. Not her living mother.
It is cold water over her head.
The ghost wraps its strong and bony arms more tightly around her, crushing her chest until she cannot breathe.
Who is it who embraces her? Who is it who urges her on?
