The stairwell was situated in the middle of the corridor, from which, on either side, ten colourful doors led into rooms of the same colour, like an oversized child’s toy.
It was wider than the corridor and taller, as it continued up to the second floor. A curved staircase led down to the entrance hall and on, via a narrower landing, to the rear rooms of the house. Above the staircase stretched a fresco, whose colours appeared subdued in the night-time light, though they had not faded away: Phaedra, pale and tall, one hand on her heart, in the other the empty cup of poison; Hippolytus, youthful, turned away, racing off in his chariot with almost insulting purity, looking back but not yet realising that the horses were shying away from the sea monster; in the background, a sky that looked as though someone had mixed arsenic with cobalt blue.
Justin stopped beneath the fresco and looked up. After the *Bombé surprisè*, he had thought the house could find no more accurate image than ice under fire. Now he saw Phaedra above him, and the image seemed more cruel because it did not melt.
Justine was standing by the balustrade. She had placed one hand on the dark wood, as if she needed to check whether the staircase would really hold her weight. Vittorio had stopped a few steps below them. From there, he could see the corridor with its doors: red, green, yellow, blue. Behind every door lay a pair that he himself had formed. Behind every door now lay something that would no longer fit back into the dining room.
For a while, no one spoke.
The house was not silent; old houses were never silent. But it no longer sounded like a welcoming place. It sounded like a place of waiting.
Justin was still looking up at Phaedra. Then he lowered his gaze.
‘I must tell you what I’ve heard, and I’m not saying it because I’m proud of it. I was standing outside Mary’s door, even though I should have carried on, and at first I thought I was only pausing because her voice sounded different from how it had at the table. Then Valeria’s name came up, and I heard enough to realise that this dead woman was no stranger to Mary, but a woman who had stood before her, holding Drogheda in her hand.”
Justine turned towards him, but she didn’t interrupt him. That was more unusual than any question. Vittorio raised his head, as if he’d been expecting the words and at the same time hoping he wouldn’t have to hear them.
Justin continued speaking, more slowly now, because he knew that every sentence opened a door behind which someone lived.
“Valeria claimed to be Carl Carson’s illegitimate daughter, and she wanted to use that to lay claim to Drogheda. Mary told Bak that Carl was infertile, that the doctor knew it, Carl knew it and she knew it, and that under no natural circumstances could Valeria be this man’s daughter. But the lie was by no means harmless, because Mary wanted children, not just heirs, and because Valeria had struck right at the very place where Mary had, for decades, pretended there was nothing but property.”
Justine clenched her fingers tighter around the balustrade. Now the icy breath of her great-aunt reached her, not through the wood, but from Justin’s mouth, and that made it no less stolen.
Vittorio looked at the fresco. Phaedra did not look back.
“So Madame Sebastienne was not merely a political idealist or a blackmailer who’d turned up out of the blue, but a woman who had turned an impossible birth into a weapon. She didn’t just want money when she threatened Mary with a daughter Carl could never have; she wanted to sully the family’s entire legacy—family tree, inheritance, marriage, childlessness, faith. I suspected many things, but I never suspected that Mary’s hardest trial would be, of all things, a medical humiliation.”
Justine now turned fully towards him. The light from the small wall lamp fell on her face, but it did not soften her features. It merely showed more clearly that she was frightened.
“I’ve only heard that Mary wants me for Drogheda, and I’ve heard that she loves me—if one can even use that word for Mary. I hadn’t heard that Valeria was blackmailing her, and I knew nothing about Carl. Now I understand why her love sounds like a will; she never had a child, so she turns the heir into a child, and the child back into a piece of land.”
Justin wanted to say something, but Justine raised her hand. She didn’t need to be interrupted, nor did she need any consolation that would cut short her monologue. She hadn’t heard everything yet, and yet there was already too much to take in.
Vittorio climbed the two steps until he was level with them. Under Phaedra’s piercing gaze, his gown looked darker, almost black-blue. He did not place his hand on Justine’s shoulder. Perhaps he knew that such a gesture would have been too feeble a comfort today.
“I must speak too, and I do so with shame, because I came by this knowledge in no other way than Justin did. I was standing in the corridor outside the green room, not out of curiosity, but because I was passing by and heard Meghan’s voice; yet that only lessens my guilt in form, not in substance. I stopped because Ralph’s name was mentioned, and I heard what I had perhaps been carrying within me for years, without having the courage to truly know it about my friend.”
Justine fell very silent.
The name Ralph de Bricassart was not like Valeria. He was older, taller, more saintly and more unholy at the same time. In her childhood, he had loomed in rooms even when he wasn’t there. His rare visits were marked by downright pompous receptions. He was the man who, through Rome, the Church and silence, had always been more than just a family friend.
Vittorio did not speak quickly. Every word seemed to be fought against an inner resistance.
“Valeria had blurry photos of your mother and Ralph, and Meghan told Lito that Valeria wanted to use those pictures to destroy them. She wanted to claim that Dane wasn’t Luke’s son, but Ralph’s. I’m not repeating this as an accusation, Justine, nor am I repeating it as a priest who might offer you comfort; I’m saying it because that night has robbed us of any clear ignorance.”
Justine let go of the balustrade. What she had feared since her earliest childhood was now unfolding before her mind’s eye. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Justin rushed over to catch her as her knees briefly buckled. She didn’t step back. Nor did she step forward. For a moment, her body did nothing at all, as if it had decided that any movement would be an admission of guilt.
Justin looked at her. “Shall I kiss you?”
Vittorio shook his head: “That kiss would not be the love of a mother and a father. That’s what has always bound Dane and you together: your fathers weren’t there.” He continued, and his voice now had the tone of a man standing before an altar to offer a dove to the goddess Aphrodite.
“Meghan said Sebastienne hadn’t had enough to prove the story was true, but enough to spread slander. She said Dane had been God’s forbidden gift to her, and that Valeria had threatened to make that photograph public on the day of his inauguration in Gilley. I heard that, and I wasn’t surprised enough; that is perhaps the heaviest part of my guilt, for I knew Ralph, I knew his silence, and I often considered his sanctity to be stronger than the human traces he left behind.”
The fresco above them was suddenly no longer mere decoration. Phaedra loved forbidden love. Hippolytus was the son who was not allowed to be what others expected of him. The sea in the background looked like the bay below the house, and the horses seemed as though they might be swallowed up by the sea monster at any moment.
Justine looked up. When she spoke, she did not do so hastily. She spoke as though she first had to retrieve every word from a role she no longer wished to play.
‘So Dane was my half-brother, and no one thought me worthy of knowing that, even though I have to live with the fact of his death. My mother not only loved her son more than her daughter, but saw in him the man she could never have, and all those years I stood by like a failed second child. I don’t yet know whether I’m angry about it or whether it’s worse that I finally understand her.’
Justin lowered his gaze to Justine’s lap.
Justine took a few steps along beneath the fresco. The stairwell made her movements seem larger than life, almost theatrical, but she wasn’t acting. That was the eerie thing about it. Without a stage, she was more defenceless than any actress.
“Phaedra above us is a rather tasteless choice for this corridor, Your Eminence, if your family likes to claim that such things only happen in myths. Hanging up there is a woman who is consumed by a forbidden love, and from whose love springs the very hatred with which she kills the young man she loves, because she cannot have him. And Hippolytus is a young man destroyed by the fault of adults, and a household that realises only too late what has long since begun within him. I do not know whether you have always liked this fresco, but tonight it casts a sombre shadow over us, even if it was certainly no sea monster that pushed Valeria off the cliff.”
Vittorio looked up at the painting. An Italian ancestor had presumably considered this fresco elegant, erudite, a display of classical nobility above a Greek staircase on an island right next to Hydra, where Hippolytus and Phaedra were said to have met their deaths, to the grief of their husband and father, Theseus. Now the fresco had become a witness against the family.
He did not reply immediately. When he spoke, his words were longer than a consolation and shorter than a lecture.
“I used to fear this fresco as a boy, though at the time I didn’t know why. Later, I regarded it as a moral warning against fleeing too hastily, then as a work of art, then as proof that families like to paint their most dangerous stories on the ceiling so as not to have to talk about them.
Today I see that Phaedra and Hippolytus do not hang above us, but drift between us, real as ghosts.”
Justin looked at Justine. She was pale, but clear-eyed. Too clear-eyed, perhaps, after learning the truth about the difference between her father and Dane’s. There is a clarity that comes only just before a breakdown.
“Now I must speak,” she said, and then she paused, as if she herself had realised that she’d just bubbled out another sentence like a Greek spring nymph, to avoid falling into a filthy swamp. She began again, more slowly and in a voice that no longer belonged at the table. ‘Valeria blackmailed me too, and I didn’t tell anyone because at first I thought it was just political noise, and later I thought it was something sordid that I wanted to clean up on my own. At first she wrote to me using Marxist slogans against my family’s wealth, as if I were a bourgeois woman straight out of a shoddy Thuringian textbook, an Australian heiress who let herself be admired on stages across Europe whilst other women toiled on the Drogheda, were exploited and died as the spoils of the rich. Then she dropped the slogans and said outright that I was a thief of her inheritance, because as an actress I merely play the role of the free woman, whilst she represents true emancipation.”
Justin closed his eyes, surprised that Valeria had reached Justine.
Justine continued. She didn’t speak any louder, but every word became more precise, like a rehearsed monologue in a Grillparzer tragedy.
“She wrote that I’d deliberately let Dane die because, as his only granddaughter, I’d inherit the whole of Drogheda without him, and she wrote this in sentences that sounded like revolution and, at the same time, like bad theatre. She called me an inheritance-hunter, the daughter of a sinner, the darling of a childless matriarch, my brother’s murderer, and later she became more practical and demanded money for her silence. I gave her nothing because I thought that anyone who expressed themselves so melodramatically couldn’t be dangerous, and perhaps that was the most foolish act of vanity in my life.”
Vittorio listened with his head bowed. Justin had clenched his hands into fists, not against Justine, but against the idea that Sebastienne had used Dane’s death against Justine.
Justine now looked at both men. Her gaze was not imploring. It was almost withered.
“You can see how generously Valeria handed out her knives. I had reason to want to get rid of her; and yet I had no idea that she was also blackmailing my mother and Great-Aunt Mary. Only Granny Fiona, I think, was probably the only one she didn’t blackmail, because Granny never kept enough of herself to make it a basis for blackmail.”
The remark about Fiona hung heavier in the stairwell than Justine had expected. It was an unfair yet true statement—a dangerous combination. Fiona had spent her whole life serving others, and that very fact might mean that Valeria had underestimated her. Or that Valeria knew that work is sometimes one’s deepest possession.
Justine now stepped closer, but cautiously. His words didn’t come straight away. He first had to sort through the images in his mind without turning it into an interrogation.
“I don’t think Fiona is unscathed just because the blackmailer may not have written any letters to her. If someone claims that Drogheda belongs to a daughter of Carl’s whom she doesn’t know, then Fiona’s whole life there is under attack too – her work, her loyalty, everything she’s done without ever being allowed to call it her own. But you’re right that Valeria has taken Mary, Meghan and you directly under her wing, and that we can no longer pretend there’s just a stranger out there.”
Justine barely nodded. She wasn’t relieved. She had openly admitted her motive, but she also found it easy to do so, as she had been at the centre of the group at the time of the incident.
Vittorio turned towards the stairs. It was dark downstairs, but the scent of the melting bombé wafted up to them.
“We must be careful how we process these truths. If we throw them into the ring like accusations, we’re doing Ms Sebastienne’s work for her posthumously, and if we keep them to ourselves, we leave the gaps wide open and unprotected for the next blackmailer. The tragedy of that night isn’t that we can’t see any motives, but that we have to plan for tomorrow today.”
Justine gripped the balustrade again. Now came the sentence she’d probably already been thinking before she dared to say it.
“Bak is still the only one who wasn’t with us at the time of the scream. Mary would have had a reason to pay her, Meghan would have had a reason to pay her, and I would have had a reason to pay her, because I’m either unscrupulous or desperate. I’m not saying Bak definitely did it, but I am saying that Sebastienne’s death has played out in such a way that the most innocent stranger suddenly looks like the most likely culprit, regardless of which of the three of us set her up. And I also realise that I’m the prime suspect, because Great-Aunt Mary and Mum didn’t know Sun before I brought her to this island today.”
Justin looked at her in shock, not because the thought was alien to him, but because it came from Justine of all people. She stood beneath Phaedra, spoke of payment, suspicion and the case, and yet she didn’t sound like a penitent. She sounded like someone who realises that any of the women in her family could push another woman to the edge of a deadly, plunging cliff.
Vittorio shook his head slowly. Not in rejection, but in resistance to the temptation to reduce the tragedy to binary logic.
“The Korean woman is not innocent simply because she is a stranger, and she is only a suspect because she was alone in the courtyard with the body. She is a woman with her own history of guilt, her own legacy, her own father, her own brother, and Mary used her because, at the table, foreignness always looks more suspicious than past suffering. If we now say that Mary, Meghan or Justine paid Sun, then we must know very precisely whether we are identifying a possibility or merely taking Valeria’s game into the next round.”
Justine fixed her gaze on Hippolytos’s horses, whose eyes, wide with terror, could already see the sea monster, whilst the fleeing boy still looked back towards his parents’ house, heedless of the mortal danger before him. Justine’s face was hard, but not defiant. She had heard too much that night to remain simply childish.
“I’m naming the possibility because the police will name it too. I’m accusing her anyway, because it would be worse if Sun were executed alone tomorrow, whilst we all look the other way, feigning surprise and propriety. And I lament the possibility of Sun’s guilt, because for the first time I see that Valeria need not have died to save us; she died from a broken neck on the stone floor, so that each of us must ask ourselves whether our own relief at her death is already complicity in her murder.”
Justin looked up at the fresco. Hippolytos recoiled. Phaedra remained where she stood. The sky behind them was full of painted storms that had not rained down for decades.
He spoke softly, but at length.
“Perhaps this is the point at which we must stop asking ourselves who hated Valeria, for almost every one of you had reason to. The better—and more terrible—question is who would have acted on that hatred, and who is merely relieved that someone else—God, chance, or a misstep—took action instead. I don’t know if that’s a distinction the police will accept, but for the soul it may be everything; even if it doesn’t provide an alibi for Bak.”
Vittorio looked at Justin. There was gratitude in his gaze, but also concern. Justin had the gift of seeing visions; yet visions do not always offer protection. Sometimes they merely open further doors.
Vittorio stepped into the centre of the landing. Standing between Phaedra and Hippolytus, he did not look like a judge, but like a juror who had realised too soon that his vote would have to be part of a death sentence in order to save at least a few of the living.
“We won’t tell anyone everything. We won’t go to Mary, or to Meghan, or to Miss Bak, and we won’t drag Fiona out of the blue room just because her silence bores us. The three of us will keep these truths locked away in our hearts and lungs until the next watch, and when the police arrive, we’ll stick together to protect everyone who’s eaten from the Bombé, even if it means making Valeria Sebastienne’s situation even worse than it already was.”
Justine looked at him. Her voice was calmer, but not reassured.
“I won’t lie if I’m asked. I won’t claim that Valeria was a stranger to me, just because it would be more convenient not to have been branded a gold-digger. But neither will I throw the name Ralph in my mother’s face whilst she’s still breathing and Dane can no longer speak.”
Justin nodded. He realised his hand was trembling and put it in his pocket so that Brian wouldn’t see it if he stepped out of the yellow room.
“I’ll say what I’ve heard if I have to, but I don’t want to be the one to carry Mary’s longing for a child out into the corridor like a lost item. I took something through a door that didn’t belong to me, and yet I can’t simply put it back. Perhaps eavesdropping that night is a burden one must bear, because it protects someone.”
Vittorio nodded slowly. Then he looked back at the fresco. His speech was almost a prayer, but it was addressed neither to Artemis nor to Aphrodite.
“Phaedra loved wrongly, Hippolytus died proudly and innocent, and afterwards everyone claimed they had merely obeyed the laws of honour, purity or divine order. I fear families have been doing this for millennia: they turn desire into a law, shame into silence, and a dead child into a myth. Tonight, at least, we shall try not to make the same mistake with Dane.”
Justine heard her brother’s name—her half-brother, she corrected herself—in that sentence and closed her eyes briefly. Her brother appeared before her in all his kindness, as the youthful Hippolytus, and smiled at her: ‘Don’t cry for me, Jussie!’
Downstairs in the house, a door slammed softly against its frame.
None of the three went to investigate straight away. They remained beneath Phaedra and Hippolytus, three watchers in a stairwell that suddenly seemed darker than the rest of the villa. Behind them lay red, green, yellow and blue rooms. Ahead of them lay the rest of the vigil. And between them lay the realisation that Valeria Sebastienne had not brought the tragedy into this house. She had merely, with her death cry, set the drama in motion against this Greek backdrop.
