Scarlet Widow by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

that they had all disappeared in seconds.
    Beatrice was trying to turn her father over so that she could see his face. Mr Andrews knelt down beside her and said, ‘Let’s take him inside and see how bad he’s been hurt. Duncan! Charlie! Give us a hand here, would you!’
    Three men lifted Clement off the step and carried him into the bar, where they cleared a table and laid him down. His eyes were closed and his face was grey. Blood was sliding from the sides of his mouth and his breathing was shallow. Mr Andrews unbuttoned his waistcoat and his shirt, which was soaked with blood.
    ‘Can somebody fetch me some rags?’ Mr Andrews called out, and a middle-aged woman untied her apron and said, ‘Here, Dicky, use this.’ Beatrice recognized her as Molly, the wine-seller, who was usually walking up and down the streets with her basket of bottles.
    There was so much blood leaking out of Clement’s chest and stomach that Molly’s apron was rapidly soaked, too. Beatrice could see that the porter had stabbed him in the chest – two shallow wounds in his breastbone, but a much deeper wound between his ribs – and had then stabbed him twice in the lower left side of his stomach. The wounds in his stomach were gaping like the mouths of dying fish and there seemed to be no way to stop them bleeding.
    Beatrice was trembling with shock. She laid one hand on her father’s forehead and said, ‘Papa! Papa! Can you hear me, papa? It’s Bea! It’s your angel, papa!’ But her father’s eyes remained closed and only a single bubble of blood came out from between his lips.
    Molly had brought some muslin rags from behind the bar and Mr Andrews folded them up and pressed them hard against Clement’s chest wound.
    ‘Come along, ’pothacree, don’t give up on us now,’ he said, but Beatrice caught him looking up at Molly and his expression was grim.
    ‘Can’t we take him to the hospital, Mr Andrews? He needs a surgeon, doesn’t he? Somebody to sew up all of those cuts.’
    Mr Andrews pressed his fingertips against the right side of Clement’s neck to feel his pulse, then he bent his head close to Clement’s face.
    ‘I think it’s too late for that, Mistress Bannister.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I do believe your father’s passed away. He won’t need to go to St Barthomolew. He’s on his way to see St Peter.’
    Beatrice stared at her father and she knew with a dreadful sinking sensation that Mr Andrews was right. A subtle change had come over his face – an emptiness, which he had never had before, even in his deepest drunken sleeps. He might have been comatose with gin but he still had colour in his cheeks and he always looked as if he might open his eyes at any moment and say, ‘My God! My head! Where am I?’
    Not now, though. He had left her, and the body that was lying on this table was as dead as her mother in the chilly back room.
    She backed away. As she did so, one of the men in the bar said, ‘Look at you, girl! He got you, too! Didn’t you feel it?’
    Numbly, Beatrice turned around. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What do you mean he got me, too? He only made me bang my head.’
    But the man pointed to the floorboards where she had been standing, and there was a trail of blood. Panicking, Beatrice opened her coat and looked down at herself. There was no blood that she could see on her dark blue gown, but now that the man had brought it to her attention she could feel wetness on her legs and her petticoats. She lifted up the hem of her gown and saw that there were rivulets of blood running down her calves. She looked across at Molly and said, ‘ Look !’ in the faintest of voices, and then she collapsed.
    *
    When she opened her eyes, she found she was lying on a bed in a small upstairs bedroom. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark, although it looked as if it had stopped snowing. There was a jug and a basin on a washstand on the opposite side of the room, and a woodcut of St Sebastian, the martyr, tied to