allin attended the morning rehearsal the following day. Now he was quite open about his suggestions, and Alice was eager to adapt them. Douglas seemed less displeased, and Caroline noticed that when Lydia was not onstage playing the character of Lucy, they quite often stood together. They did so awkwardly at first, but then with increasing ease. They might have simply been commenting on the play and its progress—Caroline was not close enough to hear—but the unspoken communication between them told quite a different story. She had learned from Joshua the difference between text—the words on the page that actors spoke—and subtext—the emotional meaning that they conveyed and (if the acting was any good) that the audience understood. For Douglas and Lydia, the subtext was that they were increasingly drawn to each other. Alice either had not noticed, or else she had, and was not as disturbed by it.

Did Alice believe she could undo any damage as soon as Lydia left? Was she so confident of herself, or of Douglas’s love for her? Or had it perhaps to do with her father’s wealth and the opportunities that it would offer Douglas in the future? Was she really so shallow? So vain?

Caroline found herself hoping very much that the latter was not so. She liked Alice. She was highly individual, and perhaps she reminded Caroline rather a lot of her own daughter Charlotte, another young woman full of impractical dreams.

Or was it really that Alice reminded her of herself? After all, what kind of a woman with any sense would abandon a respectable and financially safe widowhood in order to marry a Jewish actor seventeen years her junior? Caroline shook her head and turned her attention back to the stage, where the drama was beginning to form a coherent whole. At last Joshua himself was acting, not merely reading his part and watching the situation and the details of others. The entry of Dracula made a world of difference.

Very carefully Caroline dimmed the lights, then brightened them slowly as the coffin lid opened, the creak of the wood pausing for just a moment before Joshua emerged.

She almost stopped breathing as he uncurled his body and stood up, his face wreathed in a terrible smile.

There was a gasp from Alice, sitting close in the front row, and Mercy gave a little shriek.

“Ah!” Ballin said with satisfaction. “But one small suggestion. May I show you? It might be simpler than trying to explain.”

Joshua’s jaw tightened, but he stepped aside. “Of course.”

Caroline dimmed the lights and began again.

Ballin climbed into the coffin and lowered the lid. There was a moment’s silence. Everyone was watching. Very slowly the lid rose again, perhaps two or three inches, then long, white fingers emerged, curling like talons, feeling around as if in search of something.

“Oh, God!” Mercy breathed, her own hands flying to her face.

The coffin lid continued to open very slowly. A full arm was visible. Then, still carefully, noiselessly, Ballin climbed out and stood up, his head peering from side to side.

There was no need for anyone to comment; the difference was too clear to require it.

Caroline found herself tense when they resumed, picking up as Dracula crept up on Lucy, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea. They went through the attack, but it lacked that vital knife edge of terror. After the power of Dracula’s emergence, it was anticlimactic.

“The book says a bench, a ‘park seat,’ ” Joshua said unhappily. “But it’s awkward. It’s just physically clumsy.”

“You are right,” Ballin agreed. He turned to Alice. “Have you any better ideas, Miss Netheridge? Something less … pedestrian? Certainly something less impossible to relax back against.”

“Relax?” she said in astonishment. “She is attacked by a vampire just risen from the grave!”

“No, no, no!” Ballin shook his head. “She is seduced, Miss Netheridge. We have seen him walk from his coffin but she has not. We watch the horror, helpless to prevent it. That is your tension. Never forget it. We know he is something hideous, risen from the dead, but to her he is a lover, bewitching her, filling her dreams.”

“Ugh!” Alice shuddered, but there was no denial in her face. On the contrary, her eyes were bright with a kind of luminous excitement.

From the back of the room, Douglas looked at her with a distress quickly mounting into anger.

“Perhaps it isn’t the path above the cliff at all,” she suggested, watching Ballin. “What if she has gone to the graveyard to pay her respects to her dead father, or mother?”

“A gravestone?” James said in disbelief. “You want her seduced on a gravestone? Miss Netheridge, that is … vulgar, even blasphemous.” His face showed his distaste very plainly.

Alice blushed, but she did not retreat. “It is her neck he bites, Mr. Hobbs. I was not imagining an overtly”—she swallowed—“sexual scene. I am surprised you were.”

Now James blushed scarlet.

Ballin smiled. “An excellent idea, Miss Netheridge. I assume you had in mind one of the taller stones. If she were to lean back against it, all the symbolism would be perfect, the suggestion without the gross detail.” He swung around to Joshua. “Do you not think so, too, Mr. Fielding?”

There was only an instant’s conflict in Joshua’s face, then the resolution. “Of course,” he agreed. “It might be difficult to make something suitable. For now we can use one of the upended trunks.”

It took ten minutes to find such a thing and prop it up, with weights at the bottom so it would stand. They replayed the scene, and suddenly it was transformed. The gravestone worked perfectly, allowing Joshua to raise his arms and spread his shielding black cloak. The audience could imagine anything they wished. When he moved back, slowly, as if sated, Lydia leaned half-collapsed against its support.

From the audience Mercy gave almost involuntary applause. It was as if she was so wrapped up in their performance that, for a moment, her professional enthusiasm overrode her personal need to be in the limelight.

Dracula’s first entry to the house, with Mina’s invitation to him to come in, had to be done several times. It was mostly in order to place the lighting in exactly the right position so he stood first in dramatic shadow, and then emerged out of it, transforming from a figure of menace to one of increasing charm, even grace. The final time they ran the scene, even Mr. Netheridge could not help but be fascinated. He had come in quietly and was watching from the back.

“Aye,” he said grudgingly. “It’s gripping, I’ll grant you that.” He turned to Alice. “You’ve done well, girl. I begin to see what you’re on about.”

She smiled and said nothing, but the pleasure was bright in her face. She looked across at Ballin, and he gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment. It was so small that had she not been looking at him directly, Caroline would barely have seen it.

The scene with Van Helsing acting as Renfield worked superbly. Vincent was excellent. He would not have admitted it, but he copied almost exactly what Ballin had done, although his own sense of timing also asserted itself. The result was both chilling and pathetic, and very real.

By the time they came to Lucy’s death scene, they were all caught up in the story. Even James, as Jonathan Harker, displayed a sensitivity Caroline had never seen in him before. Mercy’s grief as Mina reduced the audience to a throat-aching silence, and Eliza, who had also returned to watch, quickly dabbed at her eyes to hide her tears.

They took a break only for luncheon: cold meat sandwiches, pickles, and hot apple pie with cream, all served in the theater.

“I think we should see more of Harker and less of Van Helsing in the tomb scene,” Mercy said suddenly. She had just finished the last of her pie and was reaching for the excellent white wine that had been served with it. “It would improve the pace. Van Helsing is the intellect; Harker is the heart and the courage of the pursuit. Apart from Mina, of course.”

“Of course,” Lydia answered. “But actually the core of the scene is Lucy. She is the one who has become a vampire. And we still don’t know what we are going to do about the children.” She looked at Joshua, then turned to Ballin. “Perhaps Mr. Ballin, who seems to have been sent here by the storm to solve all our problems, will be able to answer that for us?”

“We are reduced to illusion,” he said thoughtfully. “We have no way of physically representing a child. Alice could—” It was the first time he had used her given name.

“That’s stupid!” Douglas cut across him at once. “She is nothing like a child; she couldn’t play one. She’s a full-grown woman, at least in appearance.”

Ballin’s face tightened with anger, whether for himself or for Alice it was impossible to tell. “She is also quite a passable actress, Mr. Paterson,” he said very softly, very precisely. His voice was oddly cold, as if there was some threat in it. “We can make a dummy, something of pillows, with the appearance of arms and a head. I’m sure Mrs. Netheridge’s maid can give us a dress that will do. The minds of the audience will create for them what they expect to see.”

Joshua gave a sigh of relief.

Douglas snorted with what seemed to be contempt, although Caroline was certain that it was actually frustration.

“The master of delusion and deceit, aren’t you!” Douglas spat the words.

It was Alice who sprang to Ballin’s defense. “Stagecraft, Douglas. I’m sorry you don’t know the difference. It is causing you to be unnecessarily rude to our guest.”

“He is not our guest,” Douglas insisted. “He is a stranger who landed on the doorstep out of the storm, melodramatically, asking for help, and he has been aping Dracula ever since.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice said angrily. “He told us what happened. His carriage overturned and broke a wheel in the snow. He won’t be the only person stranded in this weather. What on earth would anyone do except invite him in, especially at Christmas? What would you have done? Tell him there is no room?”

“Invite the vampire into your house,” Douglas answered, his own voice louder and more strident. “He told you himself: Evil can come in only if you invite it.”

Alice paled a little. “No one can come in unless they are invited,” she said, glaring at him. “Don’t tell me we’ve done this so well you actually believe in this vampire stuff?” She tried to laugh, and failed. It came out as a gasp of breath, with no humor and no conviction.

“I believe in evil. And in stupidity,” he said bitterly.

Her eyes raked him up and down. Her lip curled a little. “Don’t we all?”

“Of course we do.” Lydia moved closer to Douglas’s side. “If we didn’t before, we should now.” She faced Alice. “You are fortunate to have the love of so fine a man, Miss Netheridge. I think he is something like Jonathan Harker, brave and modest, not knowing how to fight evil because he has none within himself, to be able to understand it.”

Alice went even paler. She started to say something, then changed her mind and walked away.

“Perhaps you’d like to attack the children again after we’ve finished lunch?” Joshua suggested to Lydia with an edge of sarcasm that was breathtaking. “Just pretend you have the dummy in your arms. Leave it in the shadows. Drop it, if it seems right to you, and then come forward to Harker and Van Helsing.”

Caroline put her hands over her face and pretended she was somewhere else, just to give herself time to re-gather her strength.

he crypt scene and Lucy’s final scene, as a vampire, went quite smoothly. They moved into the last act: the hunt for Dracula. Vincent was slightly overplaying Van Helsing’s mimicry of Renfield, but he added some details that were very vivid, and truly tragic, evoking Renfield as a man once decent, now a helpless victim of the terrible vampire. Joshua told him very firmly to keep all that he had added in; if the play ran five minutes longer because of it, then so be it.

“It’s not necessary,” James protested. “We’re ten minutes over time already. We’ll lose the audience.”

“No, we won’t,” Joshua told him. “It’s a superb piece of acting.”

“We’re here to entertain, not show off,” Mercy said defensively. “Vincent’s just trying to impress Mr. Netheridge. He’s looking for another lead in the London West End.”

“On that performance, he deserves it,” Joshua said. “And it’s important to the play. He makes Renfield matter to us.”

“Renfield’s trivial, a plot device,” James said with disgust.

“He’s a plot device that works extremely well,” Joshua said gravely. “His degradation from decent man to fly- and rat-eating lunatic shows us more clearly than any words what the power of the vampire is. Through Van Helsing we watch him die, but for an instant return to the man he once was. This is the only time we get to see that, to understand how far he fell. If we’re not frightened of Dracula after that, then we are truly stupid.”

James drew in his breath to argue, then let it out again. He was actor and dreamer enough to know the truth of what Joshua said.

They followed the script through to the end. They even tried the effect of the lights to create the illusion of a snowstorm, and cut down the words used to describe the last chase of the coffin carried through the mountain pass as the lights dimmed in imitation of the sun sinking in the west. They killed Dracula in its last rays, and the unearthly scream that rang out as the light faded and the curtain came down drew a moment’s total silence, and then a roar of applause.

“It will work,” Joshua said simply. “Thank you for your ideas, Mr. Ballin. You have helped us enormously. Without you we might never have succeeded.”

Ballin bowed, smiling. “It was a great pleasure,” he said. “A very great pleasure. Miss Alice, I think you have a happy future ahead of you.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, her eyes shining.

inner was quiet. Everyone was tired and ready to retire early. There were no more problems to solve; all that was left was for the script, much amended, to be learned by heart so there were no mistakes, no hesitations. In fact, several of them would write out a new copy of the script, clean, without the scratchings-out and scribbled margin notes. Many actors found writing out the script was an excellent way to commit the words to memory.

Caroline wrote out the script as well, not every word, but the key phrases that cued the light changes. The prompting script would be with Alice, though Caroline had often taken on that task. Alice’s parts onstage were only a few words here and there: a servant or a messenger. It would not be difficult to fill all the roles and still act as prompter. The lights were crucial, and Caroline wanted to focus entirely on them.

Joshua was sitting at the small desk in the bedroom and Caroline was on the bed, reading her cues over again, when she remembered a note she had written hastily about the lighting of Lucy’s death scene. She had left it on the stage.

“I’ll just go and get it,” she said, slipping her feet off the bed and standing up. “I won’t be long.”

“Shall I get it for you?” Joshua offered.

“No, thank you.” She walked over to him and touched his cheek lightly. “You’re busy.” She looked down at his half-written page. “There’s another hour’s work you have to do still. I’m not afraid of vampires in the dark. I’ll be back in ten minutes or so.”

Joshua smiled and turned back to the desk. She was right; it would take at least another hour or so to complete.

Caroline went out onto the landing and down the stairs to the main hall. The lights were always left burning low—but quite sufficient for her to move swiftly toward the passage to the theater. The hall seemed even more magnificent in the shadows: the ceilings higher, the checkered marble floor bigger, the stairs sweeping up on either side disappearing dramatically into the dark corners where they turned and curled back to the gallery above.

The long passage to the theater was even darker, leaving the distance between the niched candles heavily shadowed, the outlines of pictures barely visible. She walked briskly. Luckily there were no chairs or jutting tables to bump into. Not even the vase of bamboo was there now, she remembered, with a small smile.

She turned the first corner, then the second, her eyes on the wall ahead, searching for the next candle along the corridor. Then she tripped over something and pitched forward, landing hard on the floor on her hands and knees. She got up slowly, shaken and bruised. How could she have been so clumsy? She turned to see what she had fallen over, and at first did not understand what it was. She was in the shadow between the lights, and the object looked like a pile of curtains dropped on the ground.

Then as she stood dazed, her heart pounding, her eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and the form came into focus. It was a man lying crumpled on his side, his legs half-folded under him. Was it a drunken footman? What on earth was the stupid man doing here?

She bent to shake him, and only then did she see the long handle of the broom slanting upward. Except it was only half of the handle. The brush was missing, and the shaft ended abruptly in the man’s back. She felt the shadows blur and swim as if she were going to faint. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. It was not a footman, it was Ballin. His eyes were open and his mouth was open, as if he had screamed when the makeshift spear had struck him. She had no doubt whatsoever that he was dead.

Should she yell for help? It seemed ridiculous to scream now, deliberately. Added to that, her mouth was as dry as if she had been eating cotton. She should stand up, control herself, make her legs walk back up the stairs to Joshua. Please heaven no one come along this corridor in the meantime.

Her legs were wobbling. It was all she could do not to fall again. What had happened? Was there any imaginable way it could have been an accident?

Don’t be absurd, she told herself, crossing the hall as silently as she had the first time, a world and an age ago. Nobody takes the head off a broom and spears themselves with the handle by accident. In fact, it must have been sharpened into a purposeful weapon, or it wouldn’t have even penetrated the skin anyway.

She reached the stairs and clung to the newel post, climbing up hand over hand, pulling and balancing. She had seen murder before. One of her sons-in-law was a policeman.

She was at the top of the stairs. She reached her own bedroom door and opened it. She saw the light on Joshua’s brown hair, the fair streaks in it shining.

“Joshua …”

He turned around slowly, smiling, the pen still in his hand. Then he saw her face.

“What is it?” he asked huskily, starting up from the desk. “Caroline!”

“Someone has killed Mr. Ballin.” She gulped, struggling now not to sob, not to let her knees buckle. He was beside her, arms holding her.

“I tripped over his body in a dark stretch of the corridor to the theater,” she went on. “Before you ask, yes, I am sure he was killed … murdered. He has been stabbed through the chest with the broken-off handle of a broom. You could say …” She gulped again and the room swam and blurred in the corners. “You could say down through the heart with a stake.” She wanted to laugh but it ended in a sob.

He was guiding her to the bed, still holding her.

“Have you told anyone else?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

“No. I … I thought of screaming, but it seemed so stupid. We must tell Mr. Netheridge. Do you know which is their bedroom?”

“No. I shall call one of the servants to wake him.” He glanced at the window, then back at Caroline. She was sitting on the bed now, and he still held both her hands. “We will have to deal with it ourselves … without the police.”

“Joshua, it’s murder!” she protested. “We can’t just … just deal with it, as if it were some kind of domestic accident!”

“Caroline. Who’s going to walk through that snow to fetch the police?” he asked very gently.

“Oh … oh.” She took a deep breath. “Yes … I see. How stupid of me. We’ll have to … Oh, heaven!” Now she leaned against him as her body began to shake. “That means one of us must have done it.”

He touched her hair gently, pushing the long strands away from her face.

“I’m afraid it does. There won’t be any more strangers out in the night coming here, or anywhere else.” He let out a long, shaky breath. “I’ll go and get one of the servants. Butler, I suppose. He’ll call Mr. Netheridge. At least we must provide a little decency for the body, for the time being.” He took a step.

“Joshua!”

He turned. “You stay here,” he told her. “Perhaps you had better not let anyone else in.”

“Put a blanket over the body, if you like,” she told him. “But you’d better not move it until someone has looked at it. We have to find out who killed him.” She smiled bleakly and it felt like a grimace. “I’ve been around rather a lot of crime scenes, one way and another. Thomas is a policeman, if you remember.”

“We can’t leave it there until the thaw,” he protested. “We’ll have to find a better place for it, somewhere cold. But yes, perhaps we should take a very careful look at it first. I don’t know who, Netheridge himself, I suppose. It’s his house. You know, I have the odd feeling that Ballin would have been the best person to take charge in a situation like this.”

He looked very pale. For a ridiculous moment she thought, what a disappointment it was that they would hardly be able to put on the play now. It really had become very good.

“Yes,” she agreed. “He was very able. I’m … sorry he’s gone.” It sounded so inadequate, and yet it was all she could think to say.

“Stay here,” he repeated, then he went out the door.

t was nearly half an hour later when Joshua returned. Caroline insisted on going down with him to the withdrawing room, where the rest of the company was gathered. All had dressed again, but hastily, and none of the women had bothered to pin up their hair. Everyone was clearly shocked and frightened. James and Mercy sat together on the couch, holding hands. Douglas stood behind the big armchair in which Alice was hunched up. Her face was white, and she was clearly distressed. Lydia sat alone, as did Vincent.

Eliza sat close to where her husband stood with his back to the fire, which had been stoked up again. The huge stained-glass window made the room look like a church.

Joshua and Caroline took places on the other sofa.

Netheridge cleared his throat. “It seems we have a very ugly tragedy in the house,” he said with deep unhappiness. “No doubt you all know by now that the stranger, Mr. Ballin, has met with a very sudden death.” He glared at Vincent, who had seemed about to interrupt him. “We don’t yet know what happened, whether it was some sort of accident, or worse. If anybody has anything they can tell us about it, now would be the time to do so. Obviously we can’t call a doctor, or the police. We have no way of getting out to do it, and they have no way of coming to us until the weather improves. No doubt they will clear the roads as soon as they can.” He looked around the group.

No one said anything.

“Come now. Who was Ballin?” he demanded. “He appeared out of the night and asked for shelter. We gave it to him, as we would. Who knew where he came from? Did he talk to any of you? Did he say who he was going to visit here in Whitby? Why? What does he do? Where does he live? We don’t know anything about him!” His glance embraced Eliza, Alice, and Douglas.

“For heaven’s sake, we don’t know him, either,” James said heatedly. “We don’t even know anyone else in Whitby.”

“Well, why would anybody kill him, then?” Netheridge asked.

“He was an objectionable, interfering, and arrogant man.” Douglas pulled his mouth into a thin, hard line. “He was not difficult to dislike.”

Caroline lost her temper, which happened very rarely indeed, largely because she had been brought up to believe that ladies never did such a thing.

“Mr. Paterson, this man has been run through the chest with a broom handle. The fact that you did not care for him is irrelevant. Unless you are saying that your dislike was sufficiently intense for you to have murdered him? And I do not think that is what you mean. Somebody here obviously had a far deeper hatred or fear of him, beyond simple dislike. One does not take another human being’s life violently, in the middle of the night, without a passion that has slipped out of all control. Your resentment of his generosity in working with Alice, and his assistance in helping her believe in her ability, is surely not of that order, is it?”

There was a stunned silence.

Douglas was white to the lips. “Of course it isn’t!” he said savagely. “How dare you say such a thing? The man was arrogant, and probably a charlatan, but I didn’t do anything to him at all. Look at your fellow players. It has to be one of you.”

It was Vincent who answered, his eyes wide in disbelief. “One of us? Why, for God’s sake? It was this house he came to. It is entirely conceivable that he had actually heard that Mr. Netheridge was entertaining his friends with a group of professional actors in his daughter’s drama, even though he claimed he had no idea. Maybe that was why he showed up. Even if it were not, how would Ballin know specifically who we were? One has to assume it was someone here he came for, someone he expected to find.”

Netheridge’s face flushed dark. “I’ve never seen the man before, or heard of him!” he protested. “Neither has anyone in my family, and that includes Douglas.” He was clearly horrified, but also afraid. His big hands clenched at his sides and he started to take a step forward, before changing his mind.

“There is no point in trying to lay blame on one another,” Caroline said as levelly as she could. “We would all rather it be a crime committed by someone who broke in from outside, a random act that had nothing to do with any of us, but that would be childish and naïve. No one has come or left. Either it was a sudden quarrel so violent that it ended in death, or else he already knew someone here—who either lives here or is visiting—and an old quarrel was renewed. It doesn’t matter. I doubt anyone is going to admit to either.”

“Maybe he attacked someone, and they had to defend themselves?” Eliza said shakily. “That would mean it wasn’t their fault, wouldn’t it?”

Caroline slowly looked around at them all. For a moment her heart was pounding and her mouth dry with the hope that that could be true. Then the dead man, beyond all further hurt, would be to blame. Even as she thought that, she knew it was likely a false hope, but one she could not give up on easily.

“No one looks to be hurt,” she said at last. “No one is dirty or torn, as if they had been in a fight for their lives. And surely if that were the case, the party would now admit it?”

“One of the servants?” Mercy said immediately.

Caroline gave a little shrug. “Why would Mr. Ballin be in the corridor to the theater in the middle of the night, attacking one of the servants with a broken-off and sharpened broom handle?”

“How do you know it was sharpened?” Douglas challenged her.

“Because it wouldn’t have speared him if it were blunt,” she said with weary patience. “This is not a play, this is real. It has to make sense; we have to look at facts to figure out what’s true.”

“We must wait for the police,” Netheridge said, taking command again. “Until then there’s nothing we can do. Please, everyone, go back to bed, and get whatever rest you can. Douglas and I will go and move the poor man so that none of the servants find him. They’re a sensible lot, but this will distress them, naturally. I think it would be a good idea if we merely say that Mr. Ballin was taken violently ill and died. We can amend that when the police come.”

Caroline rose to her feet. “You can’t do that!”

“I beg your pardon?” It was a rebuke, not a request.

“Of course he can,” Douglas said sharply. “You’ve had a shock, Mrs. Fielding. Let your husband take you upstairs and perhaps you have a headache powder you can take … or something …” He trailed off lamely.

Caroline remained where she was. “You can tell the servants whatever you think is best to keep some sort of calm in the house,” she said to Netheridge, ignoring Douglas. “But Mr. Ballin was murdered. I quite see that you have to put his body somewhere more suitable than where it is, but not tonight in the dark. If you bolt the door to that part of the house it can be done in daylight, but it would be most unwise to do it alone …”

“My dear Mrs. Fielding, it will be unpleasant, but there is absolutely no danger whatever, I assure you,” Netheridge said patiently. “He is a perfectly ordinary man of flesh and blood, and the dead do not hear us. There are no such things as vampires, or the undead—”

“Of course there aren’t!” she cut him off angrily. “But he was murdered. Anyone moving him before the police get here may be accused of altering the evidence …”

“What evidence? We can’t leave him there, woman! He’ll … smell! The natural—”

“I’m not suggesting we leave him there,” she corrected him. She was beginning to tremble. “But we need to be there, all of us, or at least several of us, when we move him. One of us did that to him. We don’t want the police to accuse any of us of tampering with evidence that would have indicated guilt …”

“Such as what, for heaven’s sake?” Netheridge pretended to be outraged, but understanding was already beginning to show in his eyes.

“Such as proof that Ballin knew his attacker on a more personal level, or that there was some quarrel that took place between them,” she answered. “Something on his clothes or his person that would indicate who was the last one to see him alive. All sorts of objects are possible to discover at a crime scene, either because they were left accidentally, or because they were left on purpose by someone wishing to implicate someone else; or, conversely, not to discover, because they have been purposely removed.”

“She’s right,” Mercy said incredulously. “But how on earth do you know these things? Who are you?”

“I am Joshua’s wife,” Caroline replied. “But I have a son-in-law who is a policeman, and he has solved dozens of murders—scores. Please … let us use sense as well as compassion. We’ll all go together, in the daylight, when we can see the body, the floor around, anything that can tell us what happened. We need to protect ourselves from unjust suspicion by the police, as well as anything else.” She stopped, swallowing hard, her mouth dry.

“You are quite right, of course,” Netheridge agreed more calmly. “Thank you. Fielding, perhaps you would come with me while I lock the door from the hall to the corridor. As Mrs. Fielding points out, we need to take the proper care to be above suspicion. I shall see the rest of you at breakfast at the usual hour. Until then, please take whatever rest you can.”

Caroline sat up in bed waiting for Joshua to return. It seemed like ages, although it was probably little more than five minutes before he came in and closed the door. He looked very shaken.

“The corridor has been locked,” he said quietly. “Are you going to be all right?” He looked at her anxiously, trying to read beyond the calm words she was saying.

“Did you look at him?” she asked.

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Only briefly. I suppose Netheridge wanted to make sure you hadn’t had a nightmare or something. I’m afraid it’s definitely Ballin, and as you said, someone killed him. That sort of thing couldn’t have happened by accident.” He touched her hair, then her face. “I wish I could have protected you from this. I knew there’d be difficulties, quarrels in the cast, but I never imagined it could end in violence.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she said, surprised at how calm she sounded. “It’s probably to do with Netheridge, not us, but we must be prepared to deal with whatever happens.” She smiled bleakly. “You know, I’m really very angry. We had finally made a decent play of it, and now we can hardly perform it, given the circumstances. Added to which, I very much liked Mr. Ballin, odd as he was.”

hey were all present at breakfast, which was a silent and unhappy meal. It was clear that no one had slept well. When it was completed, Mr. Netheridge announced that it was time to move Ballin’s body. There was an appropriately cold room on the outside wall of the house, he said, that was often used for storing meat, at times when the icehouse would have been too cold.

Obediently they rose and followed him across the hall to the corridor door. He turned the lock, swung the door open, and then—after taking a deep breath—set off at a brisk pace. They followed obediently, Mercy and Lydia a step or two behind the rest. For the first time that Caroline had observed it, they seemed to cling to each other as if they were the friends that Mina and Lucy were in the play.

They rounded the last corner and saw the stretch of linoleum floor ahead of them; the pool of dark blood on the floor; the long shaft of the broom handle, sharp, scarlet-ended; but no corpse.

Netheridge stopped abruptly.

Douglas Paterson swore.

Mercy screamed, loud and piercingly sharp.

Lydia quietly slid to the floor in an awkward heap.

Douglas swiveled around, saw her, and went to her anxiously, calling her name and trying to raise her in his arms.

James went to Mercy, catching her hands, which she was waving around. “Stop it!” he said loudly. “It’s all right! He’s not here. There’s no danger at all.”

“No danger?” she shrieked. “He was dead, someone murdered him, with a stake through the heart, and now he’s not there anymore, and you say there’s no danger? Are you mad, or stupid? I told you there was something wrong with him, terribly wrong. He came here out of the night and during a storm just like the one that brought Dracula’s coffin ashore.” Her voice was getting louder and more high-pitched. “He knew everything about vampires, more than we did, more than Bram Stoker did. He was dead and locked in, and still he escaped. He wasn’t dead, you fool! You can’t kill him, he is the ‘undead.’ ”

White-faced, Eliza turned to Caroline.

Caroline stepped forward. “Mercy!” she said abruptly. “You are not helping anyone by being hysterical. If you really want to step out of reality into Mr. Stoker’s book, then for goodness sake live up to the character you chose to play. Mina Harker would never have been so peevish and cowardly, and she was faced by a real vampire who was determined to kill her. Mr. Ballin, poor man, is dead and can do you no possible harm, even if he wanted to. Take hold of your emotions and stop making such an exhibition of yourself. We need to think very clearly what to do if we are to defeat whatever evil is lurking here.”

“Evil!” Mercy repeated the word with a loud wail.

“Stop shrieking!” Caroline commanded. “I would be delighted to have an excuse to slap your face. If you insist on giving it to me, I shall take it, I warn you.”

Mercy fell instantly silent.

“Thank you.” Caroline’s voice was tart. She turned to Netheridge. “There is no point in our standing here. Clearly the body has been moved. Since there is no one in the house except us and the servants, you had better find out if one or two of them came here and found him and, perhaps out of decency, felt obliged to move him somewhere else. One thing is absolutely certain: He did not remove himself, either as a man, or as a bat or a wolf, or anything else supernatural. If you don’t want all the maids in hysterics, and possibly the footmen as well—or, worst of all, the cook—then you had better be very circumspect as to how you do it.”

“Yes,” he agreed, as if he had thought of it himself. “Of course.” He turned to Joshua. “I’m sorry, but under the circumstances I don’t believe there is any point in your continuing to practice for the play. I …” He shook his head. “Just at the moment I hardly know what decisions to make about anything. Please … look after yourselves. Do as you please. I’m sorry, but as such it is quite impossible for you to leave, or even to walk outside. The snow must be a couple of feet deep, and it is bitterly cold. There are books in the library, quite a good billiard table …” He did not bother to finish.

Caroline felt sorry for him. The party he had planned with such care for his daughter had collapsed in a tragedy no one could have foreseen. Now instead of celebration he had a crime, and a group of strangers in his home without a purpose, one of them possibly a killer.

She stared at Joshua, then at Netheridge. “Mr. Netheridge.”

He turned toward her, simply out of good manners. His face was weary, and he looked ten years older than he had when he welcomed them to his home. “Yes, Mrs. Fielding?”

“Alice has written a play that we have all worked extremely hard on, particularly she. We will perform it one day; if not here, then somewhere else. Possibly even in London, at the very least in the provinces. Considering how much he contributed to it, we could do it in memory of Mr. Ballin. Our time and her efforts have not been wasted.”

He swallowed, sudden emotion filling his face. It was a moment or two before he could master his voice.

“Thank you, Mrs. Fielding. You are a generous woman, and brave. I hope one day that will indeed be possible.” Then, before he embarrassed himself by a display of his vulnerability, he made his excuses and left.

One by one they all went: either to their bedrooms, the billiard room, the library, or the room set apart for letter writing with desks, inkwells, and ample supplies of paper.

Caroline walked away from the corridor and up the stairs to go back to her bedroom. Then she changed her mind and went to the window seat in the long gallery from which she could see across the snowbound countryside. The hill fell away, covered by trees bending under the weight of last night’s new fall. Some of them looked precariously close to breaking. There was no mark on the landscape of human passing: no wheel tracks, no footprints. It was impossible to tell how deep the snow lay, except that all the smaller features—rocks, low walls, and fences—had disappeared. They were alone.

Far out toward the sea more clouds were piled up, ominous and heavy gray. There was worse weather to come.

She realized as she sat there that they must solve the crime themselves. They could not remain here day after day knowing nothing, doing nothing. One of them had killed Anton Ballin. They had to find out which one of them it was, and be strong enough to deal with the answer together, whatever that answer was. Of course, it must also be done with caution and care. They could not risk anyone else being killed. A person who would spear Ballin to death might not hesitate to do the same to anyone else who threatened him or her.

How had this happened? It seemed unimaginable that it was one of them, from the slight vanities and squabbles they had, no more than pinpricks to the self-esteem: The play made no difference to any one individual’s career. It was a lesser part on the small stage, no money involved, nor any critical review to care about.

And yet someone had cared about or feared something so intensely that they had driven a broom handle through a man’s body. Why? What was it that lay below a surface that appeared so normal? They had all been deceived, ignorant, walking a razor’s edge across an abyss, and never thinking to look down.

She shivered, although it was warm in the house. Fires burned in every room. Candles blazed. Food was plentiful and excellent. There were servants to attend to every physical need. What lay hidden behind such apparent ease?

How could she find out, and so discreetly that she did not get herself killed in the process? If she had any sense at all, she would take very great care indeed. For a start, she would tell no one what she was doing, and that included Joshua. In fact, more than anyone else, she absolutely mustn’t tell Joshua.

She was speaking to herself as if she had accepted that identifying the murderer was her responsibility. But who else was there who could possibly do it? None of them had any experience of murder, except herself. Douglas Paterson was possibly guilty! He had loathed Ballin, and made no secret of the fact that he thought Ballin was deluding Alice that she had talent when she did not. And even if she did, it was not a talent Douglas was willing for her to use. It would mean her leaving Whitby, where his future lay. If she did not marry him, then perhaps he did not have a future—not in the way he had imagined, and intended. Charles Netheridge was a very wealthy man indeed. The house more than attested to that, quite apart from his frequent and large investments in the London theater. Alice was his only child. That was why he had been willing to invite an actor of Joshua’s fame and quality up to Yorkshire for the whole Christmas period, and pay his expenses and those of his company, on the understanding that he, Netheridge, would stake them next London season.

But could Douglas have hated Ballin so much for helping Alice? Or could anyone in the company have hated Ballin so much? He was a stranger to all of them. What danger could he present? Surely nothing in the four days since he arrived had given birth to a passion so violent it had ended in that terrible act in the corridor?

He must have known one of them before. Had he come intending to seek revenge for some old wrong?

Caroline watched the sky. The dark clouds over the sea were closer now, and heavier. A gust of wind stirred the bare branches, sending piles of snow falling off into the deep drifts beneath.

Was it possible that Ballin had not been the intended victim? In the uncertain light of the corridor could the killer have mistaken Ballin for someone else? He was tall, but so were Vincent and James. With his back to the candlelight, would such a mistake be possible? If so, they must not have spoken; Ballin’s voice was too distinctive.

Netheridge was of average height, and broader than any other man here. He walked quite differently. Douglas Paterson was a good height, but he had not the practiced grace or elegance of Ballin.

No. She could not believe there had been such a mistake.

The sharpened broom handle was a very carefully prepared weapon. It had been created, not used in any spur-of-the-moment anger or self-defense. Nobody possessed such a weapon offhand, never mind carried it around with them in the middle of the night, unless they had an attack in mind.

Was it possible someone really did believe in vampires? Was anyone so crazy? Surely not? They were actors; they played all sorts of parts, real and fantastic. They could take up roles as they stepped onto the stage, and discard them again as they left it. She had seen Joshua as every character imaginable, from a pensive hero like Hamlet to a blood-soaked tyrant like Tamburlaine; as philosopher, cynic, and wit in the works of Oscar Wilde; and the lover Antony to Mercy’s Cleopatra. None of them was the real Joshua, the man she knew.

Had Ballin known his killer? Had they intended to meet there in the middle of the night? It was ridiculously unlikely that the meeting was purely a chance encounter, surely? Which meant that Ballin knew his attacker at least well enough to be willing to keep a midnight tryst.

Why was the body moved?

She thought of Mercy’s fear of the “undead,” which she had dismissed as a vain woman’s pretense to get attention. But the fact that the body had apparently disappeared now made her fancies seem less ridiculous. Was it likely that someone had hidden the body to cause and heighten that very fear?

Possibly. But it was more likely the body was moved because there was something about it that would give away the truth of the crime. What could that be? Either something of the identity of whoever had killed Ballin, or something about Ballin’s own identity, which would betray whom he had known well enough for them to hate or fear him with such passion.

Whom could she ask for help? The only person she trusted without question was Joshua. However, he would be fully occupied trying to keep up morale and sensible behavior among the cast, especially now that there would be no performance, at least in the foreseeable future. He would have to find them something to do, to keep them at bay and hold them together as a group. Any old jealousies or squabbles that surfaced now might result in near hysteria, and things could be said or done that could not be mended.

Someone must find out who had killed Ballin, and prevent the wrong person from being accused. She, Joshua, and the rest of the players were strangers here in close-knit Whitby. Who would suspect Douglas Paterson, never mind Netheridge himself, when they had the perfect scapegoats in a group of strangers, and actors at that?

She must squash down her own emotions and think clearly. What would her son-in-law, Thomas Pitt, do? He would ask questions to which there would be precise answers and then compare those answers. If she did the same, with luck a picture would emerge, even if it was merely an understanding of who was lying and who was telling the truth.

Maybe she would be better equipped if she knew more about everyone present. For a start, she would definitely need the help of Eliza to speak to the servants. She did not imagine for an instant that any of them had killed Ballin; why on earth would they? But they should be eliminated as suspects all the same.

She found Eliza in the housekeeper’s room. After waiting several minutes for her to complete her conversation, she followed Eliza as she walked back to the main part of the house.

“I was wondering if I could be of help in any way,” Caroline began. “I don’t know if you have told the servants or not.”

Eliza looked very pale in the white daylight reflected off the snow outside. The fine lines around her eyes and mouth were cruelly visible.

“Charles said I should not,” she replied. “He has told them that Mr. Ballin was taken ill. We were going to say that he had died and we had placed him in the coldest storeroom until the authorities could come, but of course now we don’t know where he is.” She stopped and turned to Caroline, her face tight with misery. “Where on earth do you think he could be? Why would anyone move him?” She was trembling very slightly. She seemed to want to say more, but some discretion or embarrassment prevented her.

Caroline longed to be able to help her. Eliza looked frail and a little smaller than she had seemed only yesterday. Had she been about to ask Caroline if she had any belief in the supernatural, but stopped because she feared seeming ridiculous?

“Perhaps to frighten us,” Caroline answered with a very slight smile. She meant it to be reassuring, but was suddenly anxious in case Eliza imagined that it was out of mockery, or amusement at her superstition. “And they’ve succeeded,” she went on hastily. “We are all unnerved by it. But honestly I think it is probably for a more practical reason. If we were to look at the body more closely we might learn something that would indicate which one of us killed Ballin.”

Eliza looked close to tears. She stood still and stared at the huge hall with its magnificent decoration and its oil portraits of various Yorkshiremen of note, portraits that were the choice of a rich man who had local roots, but no ancestry of which he was proud.

Eliza gazed at them one by one on the farthest wall, her face filling with dislike.

“I don’t even know who they are,” she said softly. “Charles’s mother chose them, and there they hang, watching us all the time.”

“There aren’t any women,” Caroline observed.

“Of course not. They’re councilors and owners of factories who gave great gifts to the poor,” Eliza told her. “I think they look as if they parted with their money hard.”

“They look to me as if they had toothache, or indigestion,” Caroline answered. “Perhaps they were very bored with sitting still. I don’t suppose they could even talk while they were being painted.” Then another thought occurred to her. “Didn’t any of them have wives, or daughters? A woman with a red or yellow dress would brighten the hall up a lot.”

“Charles’s mother chose them,” Eliza repeated. “Nothing has ever been changed since her day. Charles won’t have it. He was devoted to her.” There was defeat in her voice, and a terrible loneliness, as if she were a stranger in her own house, unable to find anything that was hers.

“What about a painting of you?” Caroline suggested. “And surely he would love to have one of Alice? She has a lovely face, and if she wore something warm in color, she would draw the eye away from all those sour old men.”

“I don’t think so,” Eliza said, but she was clearly turning the idea over in her mind. “But you know, I think I’ll try asking him anyway. Tell me, Mrs. Fielding, was Alice’s play really any good? Please don’t make up a comfortable lie. It would not be kind. I think I need a truth to cling on to, even a bad one.”

“Yes, it was,” Caroline said honestly. “And by the time we had worked on it and rehearsed it that last time, it had become really excellent. There were some moments in it that were unforgettable. Above all it touched on the real nature of evil, not of attack by the supernatural, but seduction by the darker side of ourselves. Mr. Ballin was very clever, you know, and Alice could see that. She had both the courage and the honesty to learn from him.”

“Thank you. That comforts me a great deal, although I don’t think Douglas will allow her to write another, or indeed to have that one performed properly, by people with the talent to understand it. It is … it is a great pity that it will not happen this Christmas.”

“Yes, it is,” Caroline agreed. “But please don’t give up hope for the future.”

“Douglas doesn’t like it. He won’t allow it. He has said so.” There was the finality of defeat in her eyes and in the downward fall of her voice.

“Are you sure?” Caroline asked with a growing fear inside her. Was that perhaps the reason for Ballin’s death? It would not only ensure that Alice’s play was not performed, but also be a kind of punishment for Ballin because he had been the one whose suggestions had brought the work to life, the vivid depiction of fear and the reality of evil.

“Oh, no!” Eliza breathed the words more than said them, following Caroline’s train of thought. “He wouldn’t—”

“Who wouldn’t?” Caroline asked, knowing Eliza had no answer.

Eliza gave a tiny gesture of helplessness but said nothing.

Caroline touched Eliza’s hand, and then went into the hall, leaving her a few minutes of privacy before the next demand on her time came from one servant or another, with their domestic concerns.

She found all the cast in the large withdrawing room, sitting around in various chairs reading or talking quietly to one another. Douglas Paterson was there as well, listening to Lydia describe something to him. Caroline could not hear the murmured words but she saw the animation on Lydia’s pretty face, and the delicate gestures of her hands as she gave proportion to the scene of her recollection. Douglas’s eyes never left her. He was oblivious to everyone else in the room, including Alice, who was talking with Joshua near the window.

Vincent, Mercy, and James were all reading, grouped close together as if only moments before they might have been involved in some discussion. None of them looked up as Caroline came in. Suddenly she felt the same sense of exclusion that she knew Eliza must constantly feel. She was here, this was the right place for her to be, and yet she did not belong. She had never stood on a stage in her life, never played a part so convincingly that a vast sea of people in the shadow of an auditorium listened to her words, watched her face, her movements, while she held their emotions in her hands, moved them to laughter or tears, to belief in the world she created with just her presence. It was a magical art, a power she was not gifted with to share.

She turned away again and went back out into the hall with its grim portraits. Maybe she would never be a part of their art, but she had a skill they did not have. She would find out who had murdered Anton Ballin, and why.

he continued to struggle with the problem of where to begin. She had no authority to ask questions, no physical material to examine—not even the body, at the moment, although that would no doubt be discovered eventually. It could not be far away because no one could possibly go far from the house, let alone with a body.

She would have searched Ballin’s luggage, but he had brought nothing with him except a small hand case. Why not? Presumably he’d had cases with him in the carriage that had been overturned. Presumably they were too heavy to carry in the snow. What had he brought in his hand case? At the very least a razor and a hairbrush? A clean shirt and personal linen? It meant that there were at least a few things that she could look at to get some sense of the man: quality, use, place where they were made or bought, anything that told of his personality or his past.

What would Thomas have done? Well, for one thing, being a policeman, he would have had the authority to question people.

She would probably learn nothing if she went to Ballin’s room and searched, but she would be remiss not to try. She could even ask one of the servants if they had noticed anything. But better to look herself first.

She knew where the other members of the cast had rooms, so she could deduce which Ballin’s must be. The family slept in a different wing. Of course it would be possible to misjudge and end up in Douglas Paterson’s room, but she thought his was a little separated from the main guest wing, and so his room ought to be easy enough to avoid. It was really a matter of not being caught by a housemaid.

Ballin’s room turned out to be a very pleasant one, overlooking the snow-smothered garden. It was not as large as the one she shared with Joshua, but then Joshua was the most important guest. Ballin had been no more than a stranger in trouble, given shelter because the storm had left him stranded.

Or was that all it had been?

She stood at the window and stared out at the white lawn and the trees so heavily laden as to be almost indistinguishable one from another. Not a soul had passed that way in the last twenty-four hours, at the very least, perhaps not since the first storm struck.

She looked around the surfaces of the dressing table and the tallboy, the two chests of drawers. A hairbrush, razor, and strop, as she’d expected, but no pieces of paper, no notes. She turned to the bed. It was slightly crumpled, but not slept in. The sheets were still tucked tightly at the sides. He had lain on it, but not in it.

She looked at it more closely, but there were no pieces of paper, even between the folds of the sheets, or under the pillows.

She tried the drawers, and found only clean, folded underwear, presumably mostly that lent to him by Netheridge. There were two shirts hanging in the wardrobe, and a jacket, also borrowed. Ballin had died wearing his own clothes: the black suit and high-collared white shirt in which he had arrived. There was nothing in any of the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe.

Where else was there to look?

There was a carafe of water on the bedside table, and an empty glass. She could not tell if he had drunk anything because the glass was dry, but the carafe was little more than half-full.

She bent and looked to see if anything could have fallen onto the floor and slid under the bed. She lifted the heavy drapes, but found nothing, not even dust.

Lastly she looked at the coal bucket by the fire, and into the cold grate. If she had received a note to keep an appointment at night, secretly, she would have burned it. It was the easiest and surest destruction.

There was a faint crust of gray ash at the edge of the cinders. But whatever the paper was it had burned through and curled over, subsiding on itself. If she touched it at all, even breathed on it, it would collapse into a heap of ash. However, she was sure it must have been a small note. But there was no way to prove it.

So Ballin had received the invitation, or the summons. The other person had come prepared, carrying the weapon.

She stiffened as she heard footsteps outside in the corridor, and a maid’s laughter. Surely Mr. Netheridge would have told the servants not to come into Ballin’s room?

Or would he? Would he even think of it? He had probably never experienced anything to do with murder before. Very few people had. Caroline must do something before the maid disturbed anything, and then tell Mr. Netheridge that the room ought to remain untouched.

She opened the door and came face-to-face with one of the housemaids, a tall girl with dark hair. The girl gave a little shriek and stepped backward sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline apologized. “I wanted to make sure that nothing had been disturbed here. Mr. Netheridge requests that you do not come into this room, under any circumstances. Do you understand?”

“Yes … yes, ma’am,” the girl said obediently.

Caroline wondered whether she should ask Eliza to lock the door. But if she did that, the maids would wonder where Ballin was. Perhaps it could be explained as an infectious disease? Would that be enough, or could curiosity still get the better of someone, driving them to look around the room?

Then again, how much did it matter? There was nothing in there, except the curled-over ash remnant of a note, which no one could read now anyway.

“Thank you.” She smiled at the girl and then came out into the passage, closing the door behind her. She would find Eliza immediately and apologize for giving her staff orders, and explain to her the necessity.

Eliza looked surprised when Caroline told her. “I … I never thought of it,” she admitted. “Mr. Netheridge thought it better not to tell them anything, which I find very difficult. They will not see Mr. Ballin, and they know perfectly well that he cannot have left. No one could.” She bit her lip. “If they ask me, and the butler certainly will, what should I say?”

“I think perhaps that Mr. Ballin is ill and must not on any account be disturbed. Also that we are not certain if what he has might be contagious. But I would add that only if necessary.”

“Then why do we not feed him?” Eliza said reasonably. “Even the sick need to eat and drink, and also have their bed linen changed.”

“Perhaps we may know the truth before such an issue is obvious,” Caroline said gravely. “If not, perhaps then it will be time to tell them the truth we have.”

“Where could he be?” Eliza’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Well, he has not returned to a mysterious coffin somewhere,” Caroline assured her. “But we do need to know as much of the truth as possible, for our own safety, and to prevent any further tragedies.”

“Will it prevent tragedy?” Eliza looked at her candidly. “One of us here in this house must have killed him. There’s no one else, and there is no possibility whatever that it was suicide or accident. He could not have done that to himself; even I can see that. Who carries around a broom handle carved to a spear point in the middle of the night, unless they intend to kill someone?”

“Nobody,” Caroline agreed. “And we will all be afraid and wondering until we find out who did it. Do you think there is any chance we can forget it and carry on as normal until the snow thaws and the police can arrive, and ask us all the same questions we can ask now, except days later when we don’t remember anything as sharply?”

“No. So what can we do?”

“There are three things we can agree about,” Caroline answered. “Who had the ability to kill him: that is, the means? Who had the opportunity: In other words, where were we all at the time it must have happened? And who would want to: Who believed they had not only a reason, but no better way of dealing with it?”

Eliza frowned. “Can we really find all that out?”

“We can certainly try,” Caroline said with more conviction than she felt. “We know that Mr. Ballin was killed some time after we parted to go to bed, and when I went down again to fetch the note I had left behind on the stage.”

“What times were those?” Eliza asked. They were standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, talking quietly. No one else seemed to be around. Housemaids were busy. Footmen must have been in the servants’ quarters and would come only if the doorbell rang, which at the moment was impossible. Kitchen staff would be busy preparing luncheon for the household, which—including servants—was well over twenty people.

“We went to bed at quarter to eleven,” Caroline answered. “I went down to get my note just before midnight.”

“An hour and a quarter, roughly,” Eliza said. “Everyone would be in their bedrooms, or say they were. How does one prove that?”

“Well, I know where Joshua was and he knows where I was,” Caroline reasoned. “You and Mr. Netheridge could account for each other, as could Mercy and James.” She stopped, seeing a shadow in Eliza’s face. “What is it?” she said more gently.

“Charles and I do not share a bedroom,” Eliza confessed, as if it were some kind of sin. She looked deeply uncomfortable. She seemed to be struggling for an explanation, but no words came.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline apologized. “In a house this size of course you would not need to. In the later years of my first marriage, I did not share a bedroom with my husband.” She smiled briefly; the memory no longer hurt. “He was very restless. I share with Joshua now because we’re both happy doing so, and also we do not have the means to do otherwise most of the time, especially when we are traveling.”

Eliza smiled and blinked. “You are very generous. It must be an interesting life, going to so many places, meeting people, performing different plays. You can never be bored.”

“I’m not.” Caroline wondered how much of the truth to tell. “But I am quite often lonely, because I am not part of the cast.”

Eliza looked amazed. “But you are. You are involved.”

“Not usually. This is in many senses an amateur production … or, it was. We were to make our own scenery, and I was taught how to work the lights. In an ordinary professional production there is no work for me, except sometimes to help Joshua learn his lines. I speak the other parts to cue him. Otherwise I have nothing in particular to do, and we are away from home a lot.”

“But you are happy,” Eliza said, smiling. “I can see it in your face, and in the way you look at him, and he at you.”

Caroline wanted to thank her, make some gracious acknowledgment, but the sudden rush of gratitude she felt had brought tears to her eyes and a tightness to her throat that made it momentarily impossible to speak. She had risked so much in marrying Joshua: the horror of her family, the outrage of her former mother-in-law, the loss of most of her friends and certainly any place in the society to which she had been accustomed through most of her life. She had been respectable, and financially safe. Now she was neither. But she was certainly happier, and she was very aware that Joshua loved her in a way Edward Ellison never had.

She also realized that Eliza Netheridge had never experienced those gifts of happiness and love. Even now she felt a stranger in her own house, as if her mother-in-law still watched her every choice with disapproval.

Caroline made a sudden, rash decision. “Eliza, I wonder if you can help me. We may at the very least be able to make certain that some among us could not have killed Mr. Ballin. I imagine it could not have been any of the servants, but let us save them from police questions and suspicion by making certain ourselves. I have no authority and no right to ask them, but you do. If you are careful, and precise, you may be able to find some sort of proof that clears them all. Especially if you promise them that whatever they were doing, there will be no blame in this instance. You may need to tell them that something very unpleasant occurred, and it is absolutely necessary that they tell the truth, whatever that may be.”

Eliza took a deep breath, but she seemed perfectly steady. “Yes, of course I can do that,” she said with determination. “I shall begin immediately. Will you speak to your own people?”

Caroline smiled at the thought that the players could be seen as “her” people. “Yes. I’ll begin with Mercy and James. That should be easy enough.”

But it was not. She found Mercy in the writing room busy with what looked like a pile of letters. Caroline was quite blunt about what she was asking, and her reasons. She had already decided that an attempt at deviousness would be highly unlikely to fool anyone.

“Between half past ten and midnight?” Mercy repeated, blinking rapidly. “I was in my bedroom, reading a book for a little while, then I went to sleep. You can’t imagine that I killed Mr. Ballin. I wouldn’t have the strength, apart from the … the violence of mind.”

“No, I didn’t really think you did,” Caroline agreed. “But I have to ask everyone, or else it will look as if I think only certain people are guilty.”

Mercy smiled. “I can see how that would be very awkward. Why do you want to know? The police will ask all those questions anyway. Why are you bothering?”

Caroline had already prepared an answer to that question, as it was one she had anticipated. “Don’t you think it would be much less unpleasant if we can tell them that some of us could not be guilty, before they have to ask? You never know what else they may inquire into, once they start.”

Mercy looked appalled.

“Not that it would be criminal,” Caroline went on. “Just private.”

“Of course. Yes, you are absolutely right.” Mercy smiled with considerable charm, and a degree of honesty. “I underestimated you, Mrs. Fielding. I apologize.”

“Think nothing of it,” Caroline said airily, convinced that Mercy would do that anyway. “Will James say the same thing?”

“Ah … well.” Mercy cleared her throat. “That’s it, you see. He was restless and he couldn’t sleep. He said he was going to rehearse somewhere where he wouldn’t disturb me. So, no, he won’t—not exactly the same thing, that is. But it would mean the same, of course.”

“Rehearse,” Caroline repeated. “Are you avoiding saying that he went back to the stage?”

Mercy was perfectly still. “Well …,” she breathed out. “I don’t know where he went, do I? I was here. He may have gone to the billiard room. There would’ve been nobody there at that hour.”

“Did he say where he was going?” Caroline pressed.

“I don’t think so.”

And that was all she could learn. She knew that persisting with Mercy would only make an enemy of her. And of course, if she did not know for certain where James had been, then in reverse, he did not know where Mercy had been, either. That sort of testimony covered both people, or neither. She thanked Mercy and went to look for James.

She found him in the billiard room alone, practicing sinking the balls into the pockets around the table. She bluntly asked him where he had been at the time Ballin had been killed.

“Probably asleep in my bed,” he answered, putting the billiard cue down across the table and staring at her. “Why? Do you think I killed him?”

It was a far more aggressive answer than she had expected, and it was interesting, as if he had foreseen the question and was prepared for it. Perhaps he was a better actor than she had given him credit for.

“I find it difficult to think of any of us doing it,” she replied. “But the police may not have the same trouble. They don’t know us, and to them we are a band of actors, traveling people with no roots and no respectable profession. And it is either one of us who murdered him, or one of the highly respectable Yorkshire people, citizens of Whitby whom they have known for years. What do you think they will be disposed to believe, James?”

His face blanched. For a moment he held on to the edge of the table as if he needed it for support.

“I think you take my point,” she said quietly. “Mercy said you took your script and went out of the bedroom to practice, so as not to disturb her. The natural place to do that would be the stage. Is that where you went? If you did, you had better say so now. To lie about it, and get caught later, could be seen as damning.”

“I … er …” He blinked and shook his head, as if he were plagued by flies buzzing around him. “I … went to the stage, but it was cold and rather eerie there by myself. I decided not to bother, and I brought the script back and sat in the library. I didn’t really want to rehearse so much as think of some way of making my part more heroic at the end. Ballin wasn’t in the corridor then, I swear. I could hardly have failed to see him if he had been. Not if he was lying on the floor, as you say.”

“No,” she agreed. “Thank you. I don’t suppose you asked a footman to bring you a drink, or anything?”

“In the middle of the night?” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve got more sense than that. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of Netheridge.”

She believed him. “Thank you.”

“Mrs. Fielding?”

She was almost to the door. She turned. “Yes?”

“Who the devil was Ballin? Does anyone know? And where’s his body gone to?” His face was white in the pale daylight of the room.

“Someone must know who he is,” she answered him. “You don’t sharpen a broom handle into a dagger to kill a stranger in the middle of the night, especially when you are snowed in with an entire group of people.”

He put his hands over his face. “Oh, God! And the body?”

“I have no idea. Have you?”

“Me? No!”

“I thought not. Thank you, James.”

Vincent Singer was no more help. Caroline went to him next because it was the encounter she looked forward to least and she just wanted to get it over with. She had little confidence that she could persuade him to talk, still less that she could trick him into saying anything he did not wish to, certainly not to reveal anything that would betray a vulnerability on his part.

She found him in the library, reading Netheridge’s copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

“Decay always fascinates me,” he observed, putting a piece of paper into the book to mark his place before closing it. “You look troubled. Are you also afraid that Ballin is perched upside down in the rafters somewhere, waiting for nightfall to come and suck our blood?”

“I think he is far more likely to rot in the warmth, and attract rats,” she said tartly.

He gave a long sigh. “What a curious woman you are, all sweetness and respectability one moment, and violent imagery of the charnel house the next.”

“If you think that is surprising, then you know very little of women,” she retorted. “Especially respectable ones. We usually only faint to get out of a situation we find embarrassing. I am surprised so many people believe it. Well, that, and on occasion, there are those who lace their corsets too tight.”

“How extremely uncomfortable, and faintly ridiculous,” he replied. “Though I don’t believe that’s what you came to say. You have a look of purpose about your face. No doubt it is a grim purpose.”

“Extremely. The police will come and investigate Mr. Ballin’s death, when the snow thaws. I think it would be very much more pleasant for us if we could solve it before then.”

Vincent’s eyes widened. “Really? And how do you propose to do that? I do remember you saying, several times, that your son-in-law was some kind of policeman. Did you take lessons from him?” He made no attempt to hide his sarcasm.

She sat down in the chair opposite him. “If you disagree, I am perfectly happy to see if we can clear everyone else, Vincent. It may be one of the servants, although I think that is very unlikely. Or one of the Netheridges, of course. Whom do you think the police will suspect? Mr. Netheridge, owner of the coal mine and the jet factory and philanthropist to half the county, or someone from a group of London actors here to perform Dracula for Christmas?”

Vincent stared at her, his face pale and tight as he realized immediately the truth of what she said.

“You have a tongue like a knife, Caroline,” he observed, but his voice was shaking, in spite of his usual inner control. “I can’t prove where I was at the time he was killed, which was obviously after we all said good night, and whenever it was you went back to the theater.”

“Midnight,” she told him.

“I was in bed, but no one can prove it for me. Thank God I won’t be the only one in that situation.”

The next person Caroline saw was Douglas Paterson. She found him on the landing, staring out at the snow. He turned as he heard her footsteps. He looked withdrawn and anxious.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fielding,” he said, almost without expression. “Not long till dark again. Do you think we’ll have more snow tonight?”

She stood beside him and looked at the sky. The light was fading quite rapidly. It was barely past the shortest day of the year, but there was considerable color in the sunset. Banners of cloud streamed across the west, and the red of the sinking sun blushed on the snow.

“No, I don’t,” she answered. “I think we might even get a thaw soon, at least enough to allow people to reach us, perhaps in time for Christmas.”

“You can’t put on that play now, you know,” he said with just a trace of satisfaction.

Caroline was caught by an intense desire to both protect Alice’s dreams, and deflate this pompous young man.

“Not here,” she agreed. “At least certainly not this Christmas. But she has made such a good job of it that I think we may wish to perform it some time in the provinces, or even in London. After all, Dracula is a most popular work all over the country. And we could always bring it back to Yorkshire at a more appropriate time.” She saw his face pale and smiled at him sweetly. “Knowing how you love Alice and want her to be happy, I hope that is of comfort to you.”

He looked back at her with a fury that he was momentarily helpless to express.

“I am hoping we may forestall the police, at least to some extent,” she continued. “They are bound to ask us all where we were when Mr. Ballin was killed. Some of us are fortunate enough to have been with someone else at the time, and therefore our whereabouts are vouched for. Would that be true for you as well?”

She saw the anger turn to satisfaction in his eyes.

“Yes. I was with Miss Rye,” he said instantly.

There was nothing funny in their situation; still, she could not help allowing her eyebrows to rise as if in horror, though in truth she was not at all surprised. “Really?” she said in a breathless whisper. “And will Miss Rye be willing to say that publicly, do you suppose? I doubt Alice will be amused, and Mr. and Mrs. Netheridge will be most displeased indeed.”

His satisfaction vanished. He blushed scarlet with embarrassment and real, deep outrage.

“Your mind is most … deplorable, Mrs. Fielding!” His voice shook. “I dare say it is the company you keep.”

“I was with my husband, Mr. Paterson,” she replied, angry in turn now. “Or do I mistake you? Perhaps you had a chaperone you omitted to mention? Alice herself, even?”

He swallowed hard, his face still burning. “No … no, we were alone, in the morning room. We … we were discussing Alice’s love of the theater, and Miss Rye was assuring me that it is not nearly as glamorous as Alice assumes. She herself is weary of it, and envies Alice’s opportunity to settle down to a happy married life in a respectable society, with a husband and family.”

And money, Caroline thought, but she did not say so. It occurred to her how much more suitable it would be for everyone if Lydia married Douglas, and Alice came to London with the players. Lydia’s roles could be filled easily enough by another aspiring actress, and Alice would be an asset to the writing and producing side of the business. More important for both of them, and for Douglas, they would all be happier.

“It seems as if Lydia and Alice each desires what the other has,” Caroline said more gently. “Perhaps they should exchange places.”

“I can’t marry an actress!” Douglas said in horror. But even as the words left his lips there was a change in his attitude, a new brightness in his eyes. The anger seeped out of him as if by magic.

“Well, she isn’t an heiress, of course,” Caroline agreed. “But that has its advantages as well. There is something very liberating in owing no one, Mr. Paterson. I made a very rash judgment in marrying Mr. Fielding, but I have never regretted it, even for an hour. I have had some difficult times. I have been cold and hungry and very far from home, but I have never been bored or lonely, or felt as if my life had no meaning. I have lost certain friends—or perhaps in truth they were really no more than acquaintances—but I have gained friends who are of worth, and I have contributed to something of value. I don’t think I have ever been so happy before, even when I had considerable money, social position, and a very beautiful house. But then one person’s happiness is not necessarily the same as another’s.”

He lowered his eyes very slowly. “I apologize, Mrs. Fielding. I was extremely rude. I am afraid of losing what I know, and have always believed I wanted. I was afraid of Mr. Ballin because he lured Alice away from me into another kind of world, but I did not kill him. I was with Lydia. If you ask her, I’m sure she will tell you.” He gave a rueful smile and met her eyes again. “If I was with her, then she was also with me. We were in the morning room until you went back up the stairs again to your room to tell Mr. Fielding about Ballin. I know that because we heard your footsteps and I looked out the door to see who it was, so we could go upstairs unobserved. We had not realized how late it was, and we felt it would be indiscreet to be seen.”

“So it would,” she agreed. “What was I wearing?”

“A … a pink dressing robe, and your hair was loose down your back. It is rather longer than it looks to be.”

She nodded slowly. “It is fortunate you chose that particular moment to look. Thank you.”

“I … er …”

“You have no need to explain yourself further,” she told him. “I shall confirm it with Lydia, and we shall be able to keep the police from bothering you—I hope.”

“Mrs. Fielding!”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

She said nothing, but smiled a little bleakly and nodded.

t was after dark. Outside the wind had dropped, and the frost was bitter when Caroline spoke to the housemaid who usually changed her bed linen and tidied the room. She had come in to give Caroline clean towels, but after she had put them on the rail she stopped a moment, clearly wishing to speak. She was a handsome girl, but her face was troubled. She kept moving her hands, rubbing one with the other softly.

“What is it, Tess?” Caroline asked. She was almost certain what the girl was afraid of, and she sympathized with her.

“Is ’e ill wi’ summat catching, ma’am?” she asked.

“No,” Caroline answered. She thought Eliza Netheridge might not forgive her, but the truth had to be told some time. “He is not sick. I’m afraid he met with what may have been an accident, and he is dead. We did not tell you because we didn’t wish everyone to be frightened, nor did we want to spoil Christmas.”

Tess’s face flooded with relief, until the truth sank in that a man was dead. Her expression crumpled to sorrow. “ ’E were a nice man, even if ’e were a bit odd, like. I’m sorry as ’e’s dead, ma’am.”

“I think it happened very quickly.” Caroline tried to keep her imagination of the scenario out of her mind, the violence, the pain, and the blood; even if it had been brief, it hadn’t been painless. But she put the image out of her mind; she would never have a better chance to speak to one of Netheridge’s servants. She had to get a hold of herself, focus, and learn what she could from Tess.

“The police are going to ask us what happened, because they have to know,” she went on. “The poor man’s family must be told.”

“I’m terrible sorry …”

“Of course. We all are. We are not quite sure what happened, and it would be better if we knew. Were you upstairs late in the evening?”

Tess nodded. “I din’t stay. Mr. Netheridge were … not ’isself.”

“He was ill?”

“No, ma’am, but ’e an’ the mistress were ’avin’ a disagreement.”

“What about?” Caroline did not make any excuses as to why she wanted to know. There were none that would not sound completely artificial. “The play?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. It were about the drawin’ room, an’ such like, the dinin’ room, too. It’ll all need redoin’ pretty soon. Come the spring, at the latest. The master says it’ll all be the same as ’is mam ’ad it. It always is. The mistress says as she’ll ’ave it ’er own way this time, like she wants it. ’E says it’s always been like ’is mam ’ad it, and she says it’s time it was changed. They went on an’ on like that, an’ I know it wasn’t no use askin’ ’er anythin’ about anythin’ else that night, so I just went.”

“What time was that?”

“Just before midnight. I waited around, like, but it wasn’t goin’ to get any better, so I gave up.”

“How long do you think they argued?”

“ ’Alf hour, maybe more.”

“So I don’t think they could have seen what happened to Mr. Ballin.”

“No, ma’am. They was too angry to see anythin’ else but the curtains an’ walls an’ the like.”

“Were they going to redecorate the bedroom as well?”

“Yes, ma’am. An’ the mistress says as it in’t goin’ to be brown this time.” She looked pleased. “Wot lady, ’ceptin’ ’is mam, wants a brown bedroom?”

“None,” Caroline agreed. “Mine is mostly pink and red, and I love it.”

Tess breathed out in a sigh of pleasure. “Cor! An’ your husband don’t mind?”

“If he did I wouldn’t have done it. The pink is very pale and cool, and the red is hot. He likes it.”

Tess went out smiling so widely that Caroline heard the other maid on the landing asking her what had happened. The tale of Caroline’s bedroom would be all over the house in an hour.

The last person Caroline spoke to was Alice herself. She found her alone after dinner in a long gallery overlooking the snowbound darkness of the countryside. There was nothing to see except an occasional light in the distance where the city lay, shrouded in snow, just like them.

“I shall miss you when you’re gone,” Alice said quietly. It was simply a statement. She did not seem to be expecting a reply. She took a deep breath. “And I miss Mr. Ballin. Do you think it was Douglas who killed him, Mrs. Fielding?”

“No,” Caroline replied without hesitation. “Nor was it your father.”

Alice turned to face Caroline. Even in the candlelight and shadow of the gallery, Caroline could see the shock and shame in Alice’s face.

“Were you not afraid of that as well?” Caroline asked her. “You know if you want to break off your engagement to Douglas and come to London, it will take a great change of heart on your father’s part, to allow that.” She bit her lip. “And he might be a good deal less inclined to back our company in the future, if he feels that we have influenced you toward that.”

“But he invited you up here to help me!” Alice protested. “You came. If he then blamed you for what happened as a result, that would be monstrously unfair.”

“Not really. He has no obligation to back us.”

“But that is why you came?”

Caroline felt the heat in her own face. But she could not deny it now. “Yes. But things don’t always work out the way you expect.”

“I have enough money to live for quite a while in London, even if I don’t earn anything right away.” Alice turned again to stare back out the window into the darkness.

“It would be a very big change,” Caroline warned.

“I know. Leaving home always is, but there are all sorts of ways in which I am not really at home here. I … I feel that if I marry Douglas I shall have stopped growing, the way a plant does if you put it in too small a pot. The flowers never open, the fruit never forms … that will be what I’ll feel like.” She looked at Caroline again. “Is it worth dying a little inside, just to be safe from hurt, or failure? And there’s more than one kind of loneliness. You could spend all your life with people who only know what they think you are, what they think you ought to be, and never let you be anything different.”

“Yes, but growing can hurt, and you don’t always get what you want,” Caroline warned. “Or sometimes you do, and then find that you don’t want it so much after all.”

“So is it better to not even try?” Alice asked earnestly. “I was going to say ‘to stay at home,’ but surely home is where you are yourself, your best self, isn’t it? I don’t think that for me it is Whitby. Not any more.”

“Then perhaps you had better find out where your home truly lies,” Caroline conceded.

“Will you ask Mr. Fielding to consider allowing me to join your group? I won’t expect anything beyond the opportunity to work. And I won’t ask to come with you now. That would be embarrassing for you, after this.”

“Of course I’ll speak to him,” Caroline said quickly. “I think if it is really what you want, then we will find a way to make it possible. But all the same, give it a little longer, perhaps a bit more thought.”

Alice smiled. “And I think maybe Miss Rye would be better for Douglas anyway. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Yes, of course I have.”

“And I don’t mind,” Alice said with surprise. “When I realized that, then I knew I shouldn’t marry him. It would be dishonest, and I don’t want to start any undertaking by lying to myself.”

“I don’t see that possibility in you,” Caroline said frankly.

hey all retired early. There was little to stay up for. It did not seem possible that it was Christmas Eve. Everything was motionless in the icy grip of the snow. No one had the heart to put up wreaths of holly or ivy, ribbons of scarlet, or any of the other usual ornaments. The weather had prevented the delivery of the tree. It would be a somber Christmas, shorn of all the trimmings, haunted by Ballin’s death.

Caroline lay in bed wondering what else she could do. They did not know when the thaw would come, but it could be within the next few days. Then the police would be sent for. The reality of murder would no longer be avoidable. The players would be suspect, and every tragic or grubby secret would be dragged out, examined, and very probably misunderstood. Unless she could find an answer before then.

Eliza had questioned the servants, and they were all accounted for, as Caroline had expected. Joshua and Mr. Netheridge had searched the house again, but they had still not found Ballin’s body. Where had they not looked? Why had anyone moved it? It could only be because there was something about it that would reveal who had killed him, and perhaps why.

aroline was in bed, staring at the ceiling. She thought Joshua was asleep, but she was not certain. As soon as she knew for sure, she would get up and begin her own search for the body. Their only answers lay with Ballin himself. Something that forced the killer to go through the trouble of moving the body.

Ballin was quite a big man, and strong; he must be heavy. Inert bodies were not called “deadweight” for nothing. No woman could have carried him alone. Two together would have found it difficult, but perhaps not impossible. One man might have managed, if he was strong and used to lifting.

Joshua was asleep. She was sure of it now. Very carefully she slid out of the bed and crept to the dressing room, feeling her way. Thank goodness they had a separate room for clothes where she could light a candle and dress without wakening him. She must dress warmly, and put on her boots. She might need to go somewhere unheated.

She considered starting with the attics, but they were mostly servants’ quarters. No doubt all the rooms would be used, one way or another, and the whole area would be far from private. Also, who would willingly carry a dead body up four flights of stairs? There might be box rooms up there, full of old furniture and suitcases, cabin trunks and the like. Excellent places to hide a body, but not if you were trying to do it alone, in the middle of the night.

She stood on the silent landing in the very faint candlelight, thinking. She must make no sound, or she would disturb someone. She could imagine the furor: the screaming if it were Mercy, or even Lydia; the outrage and suspicion if it were Douglas or Mr. Netheridge; the sarcasm if it were Vincent, or even James.

Of course one of them knew exactly where Ballin was. But that was a thought she refused to entertain. It would paralyze her. Courage. She must use all the courage she had. And for heaven’s sake, also the sense.

How long did it take for a dead body to begin to rot, and to attract scavengers, not to mention smell? The rats and flies, so loved of Renfield, would soon give away a corpse kept in a warm place. Therefore it would be somewhere as cold as possible. And she couldn’t be squeamish about searching.

They burned both wood and coal in the house fires, so there would be a coal cellar. Very possibly there would also be a place inside for wood, certainly at least for kindling. Had anyone looked there, thoroughly?

The house where the meat and other perishable food was kept would be perfect, but the servants would go in there regularly. They would check all the stores to make sure nothing was spoiling. But they might not go to the icehouse, not in this weather.

She went down to the cloakroom where she had left her outside coat when she had arrived, not knowing then that they would be unable to take walks. She put on her boots. The cellar would be bitterly cold, and dirty.

She lit one of the lanterns that were stored in the cloakroom and set off.

An hour later she was aching, filthy, and shuddering with cold, and she had found nothing that helped in the slightest to figure out what had happened to the body of Anton Ballin.

Think! It had to be somewhere. Was it conceivable that whoever had murdered him had somehow destroyed his corpse? But how? Burning? The only possible place for a fire big enough to get a whole body into would be the furnace used to heat the water in the laundry room. And the maids did the laundry regularly.

Were the fires kept going all night? Hardly likely, at least not hotly enough to destroy a corpse.

Still, she would look.

She went slowly, very reluctantly, to the laundry room. The fire under the big copper tub in which the sheets were boiled was glowing dimly. One might have burned a rat in it, but nothing bigger. And the smell would have been awful.

She stood in the middle of the room and turned around slowly. Apart from the copper one, there were deep tubs next to the wall, and mangles. On the shelves above, there were many jars for all kinds of substances: soaps, lye, starch, chemicals for cleaning various stains on different kinds of fabrics.

She walked slowly through to the drying room. Long airing racks were suspended from the ceiling to deal with days when it was impossible to dry anything outside.

There was another large tub by the wall. She tiptoed over to it and lifted the lid, her heart pounding. There was nothing inside it but loose, light brown bran. It was useful for lifting certain stains, or for rubbing fabrics that needed extra care. Determined not to have to come back and search the room again, she found a wooden spoon with a long handle and poked it down into the bran. It met no resistance. With a gulp of relief she closed the lid.

There was nowhere else left to look, except the still-room. There were plenty of bottles and jars in it, but a glance told her there was nowhere large enough for a corpse.

So where was he? It must be two in the morning now. Christmas Day. And here she was frozen cold, hunting around her hosts’ laundry room for the body of a dead man. And she had told Alice that life in a company of touring actors was fun!

The only place left was the icehouse. It couldn’t be there, but where else was there to look? The stables? No, Caroline knew enough of horses to rule that out. Horses smell death and are afraid of it. They would certainly have let people know if there were any sort of decaying body near them. Even in the hayloft the smell would be appalling, and they would have had a plague of rats within hours, let alone days.

There was no choice but to go outside across the yard to the icehouse. She went to the scullery door and unlocked it. Why anyone had bothered with the bolts in this weather was beyond her. Habit, and obedience possibly. They were stiff to move, and the top one was high, but she managed, with rather a noise. She hoped fervently that everyone else was asleep.

She pulled the door open and stepped out, holding the lantern high. She did not completely close the door: She needed the crack of light to guide her back, and somehow leaving it ajar made her mission seem less final.

The air was bitter but there was no wind at all. In fact, it was possible to imagine that it could thaw, just a little bit, by morning. She walked half a dozen steps across the yard. The snow was completely untrodden since yesterday’s fall, and there was not a mark on it. It was deep enough to cover the top of her boots and cling to her skirts. When it melted she would be soaked.

The icehouse was ahead of her, half under some trees whose black branches seemed to rest on the roof. There was something else up there: piles of wood like discarded floorboards, half-covered with snow. There were more timbers to one side of the house, and bags of something. Coal? No, there was room in the cellar. Kindling? It would get soaked and be of no use. Perhaps rubbish no one had been able to dispose of properly in the snow.

In spite of the stillness, the wind seemed to sigh a little in the bare branches, and several lumps of snow fell off the trees. She was right: It was thawing, just a tiny bit.

Could the killer have put Ballin’s body out here, with the rubbish? How long could it remain hidden? Perhaps they had planned to do something else with it after a few days?

She walked with difficulty, forced to lift her feet unnaturally high in the deep snow. Suddenly she was anxious. Should she look now, or ask Joshua to help her in daylight? But what a cowardly thing to do, when she didn’t even know if there was anything here or not. And maybe if whoever killed Ballin saw her footsteps in the snow leading to the side of the icehouse, they would know someone had been there, and move the body before she had another chance to check for it.

She reached the sacks of rubbish, holding the lantern high so she could see. The timber had slid a little, and several pieces were lying over the tops of the bags. She put the lantern down carefully and started to lift the top piece of wood. She put it to one side and lifted the next one.

Then it happened—the shift in the snow on the roof. She looked up. A few lumps dropped off and fell onto the sacks. The stars were brilliant above the pale outline of the ridge, and she could see the ends of wood poking up. A larger lump of snow fell. Then as she stepped back, without thinking pulling the wood with her, there was a roar of sliding snow on the slates. A figure launched itself at her, diving downward, head thrown back, mouth wide open. It struck her so hard she staggered backward, falling into the deep snow as it landed hard, half on top of her. By the yellow light of the lantern she saw the hideously distorted face, glaring eyes, flesh eaten away and sliding off, teeth bared.

She screamed, again and again, her lungs aching.

Nothing happened. No one came.

Ballin’s terrible face was inches from her, his body hard as rock. But something had happened to him, beyond agony, beyond death. The flesh of his cheeks seemed to have half-dissolved and slipped sideways, crookedly. Even his nose was rotted away, twisted to one side.

For a moment she thought her heart was going to burst. She was alone in the night with the face of evil, the vampire without his human mask. This thing was a creature of the night, dead and yet not dead.

There was no one to help. She must do this alone. She steadied her breath and forced herself to grab the lantern and look at the body. It was frozen rigid, as unbending as the planks of wood that had held it up there on the icehouse roof.

His face was terrible, as if it were falling apart. How could that happen in the paralyzing cold, and so soon after death?

She made herself look at it again, steadily. Her hand shook, and the light of the lantern wavered over Ballin’s face. Caroline stared and stared, and slowly she realized that it was not decay that made him look as if he were rotting and falling apart. His face was literally sliding off his skin. It was actor’s makeup. More than greasepaint, he had a thin layer of some rubbery kind of substance, a gum of some nature, to pad out his cheeks and nose. Underneath it she saw the harder, deeper lines of a different face, one that in some half-remembered way was vaguely familiar. She knew him, but she had no idea from where, or when.

And as she understood that, she knew why his killer had moved the body.

Shuddering with cold and horror, she gingerly pushed Ballin away and stood up. She must go and tell Joshua. If nothing else, they must put the body in some decent place, not leave him lying on the ground by the icehouse. None of the servants, rising early to prepare breakfast, must find him.

She tramped back through the snow to the back door. Thank heaven it was still slightly ajar. Her teeth were chattering from the cold.

She walked slowly through the scullery into the kitchen. She was trailing water behind her. Her whole coat was covered with snow from when she had fallen, and her skirt was wet at least a foot above the hem.

Where had she seen Ballin’s true face before? It was in a photograph, she was sure of that, definitely not in person. But his name had not been Ballin. She would have remembered that. Anton. Had it been Anton something-else?

She was in the hallway now. Only a couple of candles were alight. The tall clock said it was nearly three in the morning. She reached the bottom of the stairs and started up, holding her soaked skirt high so as not to trip over it.

She was almost at the landing when she remembered. The photograph had been in the green room of a theater: Joshua had pointed it out to her because he felt that the man in it was a great actor. Anton Rausch. A handsome face, powerful. And there had been a tragedy connected to him. He had killed some actress in a murder scene in a play. A knife. It was supposed to have been a stage prop, a harmless thing whose blade would retract when it met resistance. Only it had not retracted, because Anton had replaced it with a real knife.

Or someone had.

It had ruined his career.

She realized she was standing still at the top of the stairs. The cold ate through the fabric of her clothes and chilled her flesh.

She walked to her own bedroom and opened the door. She still had the lantern, and she set it down on the dresser.

“Joshua,” she said calmly.

He stirred.

“Joshua. I know who killed Ballin, and why. I found his body.”

He sat up, fighting the remnants of sleep. Then he saw her clearly. “Caroline! What happened?” He started to climb out of bed.

“It’s all right,” she said, her voice steady. “I’m cold, and a bit wet, but I’m perfectly all right. I found Ballin’s body.”

“Where?” He was up now. He reached for his robe, warm and dry, and put it around her. “Did you say you know who killed him, or was I imagining it?”

“Anton Rausch,” she said quietly. She was shivering uncontrollably now.

“Ballin?” he said incredulously. “Oh, God! Of course. I should have known the voice. I saw him play Hamlet! I only met him in person once. Oh, heaven, I see.”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Yes. Vincent. He was the other actor involved in that tragedy. He was the lover of the actress who died. Anton Rausch was her husband.”

“Then he came here for revenge? But how could he know Vincent was here? And why now? That was years ago.”

“Perhaps Anton could prove his innocence now. I don’t know.”

“But if he attacked Vincent, for revenge, then Vincent is not guilty of murder. It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” she argued. “And again, how did he know Vincent was here?”

Joshua shook his head. “It wasn’t a secret. The theater knew where we would be, the manager, several others. It just wasn’t advertised because it was a private performance.”

“But if Ballin attacked him—I still think of him as Ballin—why didn’t Vincent defend himself?” she asked.

“Because Anton didn’t attack him,” Joshua said quietly. “Think about it, Caroline. If Anton had attacked Vincent with that sharpened broom handle, then Vincent would have injuries: tears on his skin at least, wrenched muscles where they fought, bruises, perhaps rips in his clothes. Vincent must have attacked Anton, taking him by surprise. He went armed. He intended to kill Anton before Anton could prove who actually changed the knives that night.”

She tried to imagine it. “How could Anton prove such a thing, after all this time?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps a dying confession. A stagehand, a prop man. We’ll never know now.”

“Then why didn’t Anton just tell the authorities, and have Vincent arrested?”

“There are lots of possibilities. Perhaps he wanted Vincent to do something for him, a repayment other than having to answer to the law.”

“Poor man,” she said quietly. Joshua took her hand. “We can’t leave him lying in the snow by the icehouse. Should we waken Mr. Netheridge and tell him?”

“Yes. I think so. Since this is his house, he deserves to know. We have taken enough liberties already.”

“Have we?”

He smiled. “Yes. Very definitely. And unfortunately we won’t even be entertaining his guests on Boxing Day.”

“But you will help Alice, won’t you?”

“Of course. We might even perform Dracula sometime.” He smiled with a wry twist of his lips, his eyes very gentle. “But we will have to find another Van Helsing.”

n the morning, breakfast was eaten, largely in silence. Then Mr. Netheridge asked the guests to leave the withdrawing room for a certain matter of business he had to attend to, all but Joshua, Caroline, and Vincent. Perhaps no one except Caroline noticed that the butler and three footmen were waiting in the hall.

“Is this about Alice … Miss Netheridge?” Vincent asked curiously when the doors were closed.

“No,” Netheridge replied. “I think perhaps Mrs. Fielding will explain it best.”

Vincent was standing in front of the great stained-glass window. His back was to the magnificent view it partially concealed, even though it was possible to see through its paler sections the sunlight on the snow beyond.

“How melodramatic,” he said, looking at Caroline. “You seem to have acquired a taste for acting yourself. But you need more practice. Your timing is poor, and timing is everything.”

“Actually, I prefer to work with the lights,” she responded. “So much depends on which light you see things in. Anton Rausch has taught me that,” she replied.

Vincent paled. Suddenly his body was stiff, his hands clenched.

“I found his body,” she added simply. She touched her own cheek. “The makeup had slipped, and I recognized him from a photograph I once saw in a theater. He was a great actor, better than you, Vincent. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Nothing to do with that actress, beautiful as she was.”

Vincent’s face hardened. “He came for revenge. He didn’t know who had fixed the blade at the time it happened, and of course they jailed him. He must have worked it out, or somebody else did, and told him. He attacked me. He came at me with that broom handle, spiked at the end like the blade of a halberd.” He lifted his shoulder a little, his gaze steady on her face. “Wicked-looking thing. I barely had time to defend myself and turn his lunge back against him.”

“Vincent, don’t make more of a fool of yourself than necessary,” Joshua said wearily. “You are at the end of this. There is no way you could have turned a weapon that length against the man holding it. And there are no wounds on you. You attacked him, to keep the truth from coming out. I’m sure he did want revenge, at a price you could not afford.”

It was Netheridge who moved toward Vincent. “The snow is thawing. We’ll be able to get a man out to fetch the police by tomorrow. Until then we’ll lock you in one of the storerooms—”

Vincent sprang suddenly and without any warning. He leaped forward and grasped a light wooden chair. If he smashed it, then one of its legs would make a dagger of hard, sharp-pointed wood. But Caroline was faster; she picked up the onyx ashtray from the table nearest her and threw it at him. He ducked it, caught his arm in the huge velvet curtain, and lost his balance. He fell backward, dragging the curtain with him, fighting hard and panicking. There was a splintering crash and the whole vast stained-glass window buckled and flew outward, Vincent with it. His thin scream echoed back in the air, and then stopped abruptly.

Caroline felt the sudden rush of cold air, and at the same moment heard in the silence the church bells in the distance, ringing out Christmas morning in Whitby.

Slowly she walked over to the gaping space and forced herself to look down. Vincent lay on his back on the paved courtyard two stories beneath, arms and legs splayed like a broken doll in the snow.

She heard movement and felt Joshua’s arm around her, holding her tightly, close to him.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, his voice catching a little. “I’d rather it were this way, for Vincent as well as for us.”

“I suppose so,” she agreed softly. She turned back from the clean, icy air, retreating into the room again.

Eliza was staring at the remnants of the window, her face ashen.

“I’m so sorry,” Caroline apologized.

Netheridge cleared his throat and put his arm around Eliza. “Not your fault, Mrs. Fielding. It was a tragedy that just happened to end here. It isn’t a quick thing. Mr. Singer let the evil in a long time ago, and it must have been like a rat, gnawing at his soul all these years. I’ve learned a thing or two from your play, the bits I’ve seen, and what Eliza’s told me about. Made me think I’ve been holding on too tightly to things I shouldn’t have. Kept too many doors shut for too long. Time to open them, time to let the good in, too.”

Caroline nodded very slowly, and smiled at him.

Behind her, other church bells joined in the welcome of the day when, briefly, gloriously, all mankind is at home.