wasn't she?
'And now Raoul's dead,' Ma said. 'So, what happened, my darling? Did you let your name slip? Were you scared he'd recognized you, or did he tell you he was one of Osborn's men? Is that why you followed him after he left here? Is that why you killed him — to stop him talking?'
Elena's legs would hold her up no longer. She sank into the chair beside her, burying her head in her hands.
'I didn't... I couldn't have! I dreamed of a murder, but I couldn't really have done it. It was only a dream, a warning . . . about the future. It wasn't real.'
'What dream?' Ma asked sharply. When did you have it?'
'Last night when I was asleep on the turf bench ... I dreamed I killed someone. I didn't mean to, but he was yelling and I had to stop him. But it was a dream, that's all. I've had them before. I dreamed of killing my baby — that's why I gave him away.'
'So you tell us,' Ma said tardy. 'But there are plenty who believe you murdered your child in the flesh, else you'd not be with us now. And if you've killed once, it makes it easier to do it again. In this dream of yours, how did this man die?'
'I ... he was . . . strangled.' Elena looked up in desperation. 'That wasn't how Raoul died, was it? Tell me! Please, tell me.'
Talbot and Ma looked at each other again.
'He was strangled all right. Living breath choked out of him,' Talbot told her with a grim satisfaction.
Elena gave a shuddering moan. 'But it couldn't have been me. I don't remember doing it. I don't remember going out. I was asleep on the seat and when I woke again I was still there.'
'But no one saw you there,' Ma reminded her. She reached behind her back in the snake chair and pulled something out, dropping it on to the table. It was the white linen shift Elena had worn last night, crumpled and stained with dried blood. Ma fingered the stains and raised her black brows quizzically.
'But that's my blood,' Elena protested, '. . . from the thorns ... it isn't his. It can't be his.'
'And the scarlet girdle you wore about your waist last night, my darling, where exactly is that? It wasn't found with the shift. Luce has looked all over for it, but it seems to have vanished.'
'Handy thing to strangle a man with, a girdle,' Talbot said.
Ma leaned forward, cocking her great head to one side. The candlelight flashed from the ruby-headed pins in her coiled black hair. 'I understand, my darling, murder is a terrible thing, a shock to a soul.'
'Aye,' Talbot said grinning. 'A bastard of a shock to the poor sod who snuffs it.'
Ma glared at him. 'They tell me that those who commit such dreadful deeds walk as if they are in a sleep, not knowing what they do, and after remember it as a distant dream. Fear can make us desperate, my darling. When you discovered that Raoul was Osborn's man, you panicked. I understand that.'
She gave what might have been intended as a sympathetic smile, but to the terrified Elena she looked more like a wolf baring her sharp white teeth.
'But you should have come to me or Talbot and told us what you feared. There's ways to sort such matters without leaving bodies all over the city to be found by prying eyes.'
'But I didn't know who he was, I swear,' Elena said desperately.
Ma ignored this. "You've put us all in grave danger.'
'Dropped us right in the midden,' Talbot growled.
'If Raoul told anyone where he was going last night, then —' Ma was interrupted by a loud and insistent tolling of the bell at the door.
'By the sound of it they already know,' Talbot said.
Ma's heavy black brows flexed in a frown. 'Talbot, answer the door. But delay them as long as you can before you bring them up here.'
Talbot, despite his bow-legs, could cover the ground as fast as a charging bull when he had to, and he was out of the door and clattering down the stairs before Ma had managed to scramble down from her chair.
'This way, my darling.'
But Elena was frozen to the spot with incomprehension and fear. Ma seized her wrist and dragged her bodily towards the curtain hanging across the corner of the room from which Elena had seen her emerge that very first