The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

by Stuart Turton

Knocking perforates the silence, the handle turning, and the door opening seconds later.

Age is thick in the air, as though the last owners sat here until they crumbled into dust.

A flicker of affection stirs within me, the remnants of some stronger emotion reduced to embers.

To see our investigations converging this way is like catching sight of something long sought on the horizon.

“I’m for it,” I say grandly. “Stanwin’s comeuppance is long overdue.”

“We’re trading devils,” says the shaggy lawyer eventually. “Perhaps,” says Hardcastle, “but I’ve read my Dante, Philip. Not all hells are created equal. Now, what do you say?”

“How splendid it is to be a gentleman.”

he lowers the needle and flicks a switch, Brahms blowing out through the flared bronze tube.

The relationship is strained, but they do love each other. I’m certain of it.”

Beneath it all, she loves Evelyn. Not well, I admit, but well enough.

cuckolding,

“I believe I do,” I say coldly, remembering the love and respect that governed Dance’s marriage for so long.

My stomach turns, a chill settling on my bones. Until now, the horrors in my future had always been vague, insubstantial things, dark shapes lurking in a fog. But this is me, my fate.

but Dance doesn’t eat his first meal of the day until later in the afternoon, believing food dulls the mind.

The directness of my question momentarily unsettles his good cheer, a flash of annoyance passing across his face.

His elderly face is a mass of wrinkles and overhanging flesh, more than enough material for his emotions to build a stage from. Every frown is a tragedy; every smile, a farce. A lie, sitting as it does somewhere between both, is enough to collapse the entire performance.

“Don’t lie to me, Miller,” I say coldly, my hackles rising.

To even attempt it, liars must believe themselves to be cleverer than the person they’re lying to, an assumption he finds grotesquely insulting.

Almost bald, his face is a river of wrinkles running off his skull, pinned in place only by a large Roman nose.

I’m too close to my answer to risk unraveling this loop. Bell will have to do this alone.

“I’m sorry?” I stir sluggishly from my thoughts. “Dance is one of the better hosts,” says Daniel, drawing closer. “Good mind, calm manner, able-enough body.”

“Don’t let this handsome face of his fool you,” he muses. “Coleridge’s soul is black as pitch. Keeping hold of him is exhausting. Mark my words, when you’re wearing this body, you’ll look back on Dance with a great deal of fondness, so enjoy him while you can.”

Anger sizzles in every word. I can only imagine how it must feel to be so preoccupied by the future that you’re blindsided by the present.

“Said it was impossible to hit anything, but I’d look very dashing trying.”

Daniel’s trying to suppress laughter, drawing a good-natured smile from Michael.

Some might find them charming, but I see only relics of former hardships, happily deserted.

Age is coiling around me, its fangs in my neck, drawing my strength when I need it most.

time being short enough without indulging pointless musing, but here and now, I pray for youth, for strength, good health, and a sound mind.

It’s been happening incrementally, insidiously.

It’s as though I fell asleep on a beach and now find myself cast out to sea.

“Hold on,” he says with a shrug. “It’s all you can do. There’s a voice in your mind, you must have heard it by now. Dry, slightly distant? It’s calm when you’re panicked, fearless when you’re afraid.” “I’ve heard it.”

but if you begin to lose yourself, heed that voice. It’s your lighthouse. Everything that remains of the man you once were.”

repeat the same mistakes at crucial junctures.

“I’m saying every man is in a cage of his own making,” he says.

“Rare that you’d lower yourself to come talk with me, Dance,” says Stanwin, sizing me up the way a boxer might an opponent in the ring.

Something about Dance puts him on edge.

I can feel the scales tipping in his direction, his confidence growing.

You murdered a man in cold blood, and that will blot your soul for the rest of your life.

to, so don’t measure me by how tightly I cling to my goodness, measure me by what I’m willing to sacrifice that you might cling to yours. If I fail, you can always try another way.”

Caution will be my truest friend now.

She’s right. I murdered her. “Do you remember now?” she says.

Beneath all the bravado, she’s still afraid of me, of the man I was, of the man who may still be lurking within.

“That’s for murdering me,” she says, standing on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on the sting.

“Now, let’s go and make sure the footman doesn’t murder any more of you.”

The book must have been given to Anna by Gregory Gold, my final host. I can still remember him raving at Dance’s door about the carriage. I remember thinking how pitiable he was, how frightening. Those dark eyes wild and lost.

“You’ve done a better job than I did,” I say. “The first time somebody handed me the future, I ended up chasing a maid called Madeline Aubert halfway across the forest thinking I was saving her life,” I say. “I nearly frightened the poor girl to death.”

she says, her frustration punctured by the sound of hurried steps on the staircase.

Fear motivates, rather than cripples. He wants to seek the footman

I’m boiling in a stew of adoration, elation, arousal, and inadequacy.

I pass into Blackheath’s abandoned east wing, a sharp wind stirring drapes that slap the wall like slabs of meat hitting a butcher’s counter.