Chapter 15: Fragments of a Ghost
Patrick leaned against the cool stone of the mantel, the heat from the flames painting one side of his face. The brandy in the bottle was a deep amber vortex. He drank it quickly, the liquid failing to warm the cold core inside him. The firelight flickered across his face, but the light didn't reach his eyes.
As he drank, the words started, a grim reel spinning in his brain without his permission. He’d spent a decade trying to silence this memory, to bury it under maps and witness statements, but the ink-stained wall and Teresa’s quiet observation—you’re a man pretending to be a ghost—had broken the locks.
The Nelson Ball. Just another crowded, glittering fixture on the social calendar. The air thick with perfume and ambition, the gossip that night had been singular, ghoulish, electric. The Rose Petal Murders.
Five women, all of them. Throats cut, a signature touch that was both savagery and grotesque romance: their bodies covered in dark red rose petals, soaked through with their own blood. He remembered skimming the broadsheet that afternoon. The image it conjured was morbidly theatrical, but distant, like a penny dreadful tale. It had been the talk of the drawling clusters in the ballroom. Rich, poor, married, maiden—the killer had no discernible taste. It seemed not to matter. He listened to the fearful whispers, the thrill of shared horror, and felt a detached, arrogant pity. What a pathetic creature.
A friend, Robert something—his face was a blur now, just a white cravat and a condescending smirk—had nudged him, nodding toward a group of simpering young ladies looking frightened. "Quite the scandal, isn't it, Jane? What are we to make of this madman's floral preferences?"
And he, full of champagne and a sense of his own brilliant wit, had smiled that lazy, cruel smile. He’d raised his glass slightly, his voice pitched to carry to his little circle. "It's obvious, isn't it? What kind of man has to murder a woman, any woman, to get her to accept a gift of roses? Even the pauper's daughter must have refused them before he killed her." He’d paused, savouring the rapt attention. "He obviously is an ugly, tormented little man. A lonely soul.Sad. Very sad."
The roar of laughter from his friends was sharp and gratifying. He’d sipped his champagne, the bubbles like accolades on his tongue. He’d felt clever. A master dissector of the human condition from the safety of a gilded room.
Four days.
Four days later, his world was that pink nursery floor. The scent was not of perfume but of roses and iron. He saw it now, not as a memory but as a prophecy he had personally spoken into the universe. His flippant words weren’t just an observation. They were a taunt, a public unmasking. He’d sketched a caricature of the monster’s soul for a laughing audience. An ugly, tormented little man. Had that beast been in the ballroom that night, masked by the crowd, listening? Hearing his private torment laid bare with such mocking clarity?
The champagne in his memory turned to vinegar. The laughter became the echo of the killer’s triumph. He’d painted a target not just on the nameless, faceless poor girls of the broadsheets. He’d painted it on Angela’s dawn-colored silk gown, on his daughter Charlotte’s soft, sleeping face. He’d made it personal.A challenge. This is what you are, isn't it? Well, I see you.
The grief didn't come then. Grief was a softer, later thing. What filled him, what he'd been drinking to drown for a decade, was a guilt so profound it had fossilized his heart. It wasn't an abstract failure. It was a specific, causal act. He’d pulled the trigger with his mouth.
He lifted the bottle and drank directly from it, the brandy flooding his mouth, scouring his throat. It didn’t help. The clarity was too stark. He finished the bottle and let it drop to the rug with a dull thud. He walked to a heavy oak cabinet, its doors warped with age, and yanked it open. A new bottle, full and gleaming, waited. He grabbed it, broke the wax seal with his thumbnail, and uncorked it with a vicious twist. The first swallow was a punishment.
The room began to lose its sharp edges. The fire became a soft, smudged orange glow. The weight of the papers on the floor became a distant mess belonging to someone else. The ink stain on the wall was just a shadow. He kept drinking, chasing the obliteration where thought could not follow, where memory could not coalesce into such a perfect, damning picture. He stumbled to the worn chaise lounge and collapsed onto it, the bottle clutched to his chest like a child’s toy. His last thought before the darkness took him was of roses, deep red, like the ink crawling down his wall.
The next morning, Teresa rose with a sense of purpose that outweighed the lingering soreness in her limbs. Her apology had been given; a terrible new understanding of Patrick’s pain had been taken. She couldn’t fix the past, but she could impose order on the present. Dressing was a slow, deliberate process. She was buttoning her cuffs in her room, her door ajar, when she heard it.
Two young maids were in the hallway, their voices hushed but carrying the bright, scandalized tone of shared discovery.
"—just papers everywhere, like a storm blew through," one said, a tremor of excitement in her voice.
"And the wall! Mrs. Reynolds nearly had a fit when she saw the ink. Said it'll never come out. Looks like someone threw a bottle of midnight at it."
Teresa froze, one button half-done. A cold dread trickled down her spine. The study.Last night.
"You don't think he... you know, had one of his fits?" The second maid's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Martha said Grace told her that in the old days, before you came, he'd smash things. Glasses. Vases. Once a whole decanter against the front door."
"Is he...?"
"Mrs. Reynolds said we're to clean it, quick and quiet, before he wakes. And not to speak of it."
Their footsteps faded down the hall.
Teresa finished buttoning her cuff with stiff fingers.A fit. Broken things. A man tearing apart his own sanctuary. She thought of his arms carrying her, the solidity of him, and then the raw whisper in her bedroom: It is.
She moved into the hallway, her mind made up. She found Grace in the morning room, directing a housemaid with the silver.
"Grace, I need you to come with me. Now, please."
Grace took one look at her face and didn't argue. She simply nodded and fell into step beside her, a solid, silent presence.
"The study," Teresa said, her voice tight.
Grace hesitated, her hand half-reaching out to stop her. "Miss Lisbon, perhaps it is not—"
"Now, Grace." The command was quiet, but absolute. It was not the voice of a woman asking permission.
They reached the double doors of the study. The silence from within felt heavy, ominous. Teresa took a steadying breath and pushed the right-hand door open.
The scene hit her like a physical blow.
Morning light streamed through the tall windows, illuminating the devastation in cruel detail. It was not merely untidy. It looked sacked. Paper was strewn across the entire expanse of the rich Persian rug in drifts and mounds—torn maps, sheaves of closely written notes, leather-bound folios lying open like wounded birds. A brass letter opener glinted near the leg of the desk. A stool lay on its side.
Her eyes were drawn to the wall behind the desk. The dark, violent splatter of ink had dried into a strange, sprawling star, its tendrils dripping down towards the floorboards. It was the mark of a contained explosion.
The stale air held the ghosts of brandy and rage. Grace sucked in a sharp, scandalized breath beside her. "Oh, mercy. Look at it."
Teresa’s eyes scanned the chaotic room. It was empty. No Patrick slumped in a chair or sprawled on the floor. The faint, medicinal scent of brandy lingered, but the man was gone. A small, unexpected relief softened the tightness in her chest. Cho must have taken him to bed.
“We’ll need water, cloths, and several empty boxes,” she said to Grace, her voice assuming a practical calm. “I’ll start with the papers.”
Grace looked ready to argue, her gaze flitting from the ruin to Teresa’s still-pale face. “Miss, this is servant’s work. You shouldn’t—“
“It’s not.” Teresa cut her off gently but firmly, already moving toward the nearest pile. “It’s his work. It needs a careful hand. Please, Grace. The supplies.” The housekeeper hesitated, then nodded, slipping out to fetch what was needed.
Teresa began. She moved with a slow, deliberate patience, conscious of the limited energy she’d clawed back from her fever. Each movement was measured. She knelt, ignoring the protest in her muscles, and gathered the first handful of loose sheets. It was like gathering leaves after a storm.
She sorted them not by sweeping them into piles, but by careful placement. Ship manifests from Bristol dock went into one growing stack near the window. Witness statements, often contradictory, formed another on the low table. She handled each page as if it were a piece of a shattered vase, finding its edges, seeing where it might fit.
About midday, her fingers brushed a different kind of paper. It was a small, creamy sheet, slightly crumpled, among the dry official reports. She smoothed it on her knee.
It was a pencil sketch of a little girl, perhaps four years old. The artist had captured a moment of pure, bouncing joy, curls flying. The detail was exquisite, the love in every stroke palpable. Teresa’s breath caught. The girl had her father’s piercing blue eyes, unmistakably Patrick’s, alight with childish mischief.
She set it aside with a reverent care she hadn’t used for the other papers. Minutes later, she found another. This was a portrait of a beautiful blonde woman with a serene smile and kind, intelligent eyes. Angela. She didn’t need to read a name to know. The tenderness in the lines was a language of its own.
Then the drawings changed. She uncovered pages and pages of male faces, methodical and cold where the family sketches had been warm. There were five distinct base faces, but each was drawn over and over with variations. One had a full beard in one sketch, was clean-shaven in the next, sported a moustache or spectacles in another. Hairstyles changed from cropped to long, wavy to straight.
He was trying to find several people who were trying to disguise themselves. The systematic repetition was eerie. Why was he looking for these men? Her curiosity, a live wire she’d been trying to suppress, sparked.
She began to read the headings on the pages she was stacking. “Report on the whereabouts of one Marcus Pike, formerly of Covent Garden.” “Inquiry into ship’s surgeon, Elias Vance, suspected of purchasing anatomical specimens illegally.” The dry language of investigation. She tried to stack them without reading further, to respect the monumental, private wall he had built.
Her hand hovered over a thicker stack. It felt different. She lifted it. The top page was a cheaply printed handbill, its type faded. ‘THE ROSE PETAL KILLER STRIKES AGAIN,’ it screamed. ‘Five Women Found in as Many Weeks.’ The date was ten years old. Beneath it was another from the following year. ‘Four More Lives Claimed.’ Her eyes scanned the brief, gruesome descriptions. The third victim that year was listed as ‘Lady Angela Jane, of Mayfair.’ The fourth: ‘Charlotte Jane, child.’
The air left her lungs. Each subsequent sheet was another year’s grim tally, a chronicle of failure. Three murders. Six. Four. All the way to a clipping from this past spring. The hunt had never stopped. Patrick wasn’t just looking for several men. All these leads, these five shifting faces, they were branches from a single, rotten tree. He was hunting one man. The man who had taken everything.
She sat back on her heels, the weight of it crushing. This room wasn’t a study. It was a war room. A shrine to a decade of obsession. A sudden, sharp shame flooded her. She was intruding on a sacred, terrible grief. She placed the stack down carefully, as if it might detonate.
For the next few hours, she worked in silence, reassembling the fortress of paper brick by brick. She did not read another word. By evening, the desk was clear, the books stood neatly on their shelves, and the papers stood in ordered, silent regiments. Only the violent star of ink on the wall remained.
She filled a basin with warm water and vinegar, kneeling before the stain. The dried ink resisted, flaking in dark flakes like scabs. She worked the cloth in small, patient circles, the rhythmic sound filling the quiet room. The light was fading to a deep cobalt blue outside the windows when the door opened.
She didn’t need to turn. The shift in the air, the slight hesitation in the footsteps, told her. Patrick stood in the doorway, his face a careful blank, his eyes taking in the transformed room, the ordered stacks, the woman on her knees scrubbing his rage from the wall.
He stood there for a long time, just watching. The rhythmic, damp sound of cloth on wood was the only noise. Her hair was coming loose, dark strands sticking to her damp neck. She had not acknowledged she heard him enter.
He moved finally, his steps quiet on the rug. He stopped a few feet from her kneeling form, casting a long shadow across the half-cleaned stain. She sat back on her heels and looked up, her green eyes wide in the dimming light.
“You’re awake,” she said, her voice neutral. She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint grey smudge.
“Unfortunately.” His own voice was gravel, scraping his throat raw.
She studied his face. The pallor, the shadows like bruises under his eyes. “How are you feeling?”
“Awful.” He let out a short, humourless breath. “Did you… clean all of this up?”
“The papers are sorted. The books are back. This is proving stubborn.” She nodded at the wall, then returned to scrubbing. “I have some experience cleaning up after drunk men.”
The statement was delivered flatly, a simple fact. It landed in his gut like a stone. He saw a different house, a different raging man, and a younger Teresa bracing for impact. His shame curdled, becoming something hotter and more immediate.
He walked to the bucket, picked up the other cloth lying beside it, and dunked it. The water was lukewarm and grey. He knelt beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. He started on a lower tendril of the stain, his movements slow and methodical.
The silence stretched, filled only with the wet sounds of their work. The vinegar smell was sharp in his nose.
“Did you read any of it?” he asked, not looking at her. “The research.”
“No.” Her answer was too quick, a fraction of a second too soon.
He knew. He opened his mouth, a cold retort ready about privacy and prying, but stopped. He just watched her, waiting.
She sighed, a soft surrender. She kept scrubbing. “That’s not true. I read a little. Just the handbills. Enough to sort the papers into some kind of order.”
Patrick said nothing. He scrubbed harder at a spot that was already clean.
She hesitated, her cloth pausing. “You’ve probably heard this from every person you’ve ever met. But I am sorry. For your loss. It must be… an impossible weight.”
He stopped cleaning. The words, so ordinary, didn’t bounce off him this time. They slipped through a crack he hadn’t known was there. “Thank you,” he said, the words hoarse and unfamiliar.
He found himself wanting to tell her. Not the broad, safe facts, but the ugly, specific poison of it. The need was a physical pressure behind his ribs. He thought it was because she was a truly good person, not by disciplined effort like a saint, but by nature, the way a stone is hard. He wondered, with a sudden, dark clarity, if he wanted her to hate him for it. To look at him with the revulsion he felt for himself, to punish him in a way his own isolation could not.
He took a deep breath that did nothing to steady him.
“I made an evil man very angry,” he said, the words leaving him like stones dropping into a well. “Out of arrogance. Stupidity. And he killed them to teach me a lesson. To make me sorry for what I’d done.” He watched her profile. She had gone very still. “And I am sorry. Being sorry is a far worse punishment than being dead. Everybody dies. Very few people ever feel truly sorry for the bad things they’ve done.”
He told her about the ball then. The glittering lights, the champagne flute in his hand, the scent of expensive perfume. He described his own voice, dripping with condescending wit, dissecting the killer’s motive for a laughing crowd. An ugly, tormented little man.
“I found them four days later,” he finished, his voice now utterly empty. “In the nursery. It’s my fault.”
The room was quiet. The last of the sunset was a dull ember glow beyond the windows.
Teresa set her cloth back in the bucket with deliberate care. She turned her head and looked at him, her gaze direct and unwavering. There was no pity in it. It was something firmer.
“You didn’t kill them,” she said, her voice low but clear. “This Rose Petal Killer did. What happened to your wife and daughter is not your fault.”
He flinched as if she’d struck him. The expected condemnation hadn’t come. This was worse. This was absolution, and it felt like a lie he desperately wanted to believe. A single, traitorous tear escaped, tracing a hot path through the dust on his cheek. He turned his face away, back to the wall, to the fading stain of his rage, and said nothing at all.
Teresa watched him, the raw silence heavier than any words. His story broke something inside her, the image of a man using his own brilliant wit to unknowingly sign a death warrant for everything he loved. It was an agony so particular, so perfectly self-made, that her earlier platitudes felt insulting. You didn't kill them. He had, in the torturous logic of grief. She saw that now. Trying to convince him otherwise would just be another kind of violence, forcing him to defend a guilt he needed to carry.
She dipped her cloth again, the water now charcoal black. The rhythm of scrubbing returned, a soft, patient sound against the lingering quiet. Her mind whirled, but the confusion began to settle into a sharp, painful clarity. She understood the room, the piles of paper, the decade-long hunt with a new, dreadful intimacy.
"So you hunt him because you're guilty," she said, not looking at him, speaking the words to the clean patch of oak she was revealing. It wasn't a question.
His shoulders relaxed a fraction, as if relieved to be finally understood."Yes."
She shifted her weight on her knees, wincing slightly at a dull ache that was settling deep. "Do you know who he is now? After all these boxes and maps?"
Patrick leaned back, staring at the cleaned section of wall."Maybe. A shape is forming. He was smart enough to disappear for years at a time, but that takes resources. A new set of documents arrived last week." He paused, his gaze distant, analytical. "It suggests the Rose Petal Killer wasn't just mimicking the aristocracy. He might have been born into it."
The cloth in Teresa’s hand froze. Water dripped from it onto the floorboards. She slowly turned her head to look at him. "A peer?"
"Possibly. Or a son of one. The pattern of the early murders, the knowledge of households, the ability to vanish without a whisper into a world that protects its own... it fits." His voice was flat, the tone of a man discussing a chess problem.
Teresa felt a cold dread, different from the horror of the story. This was practical, immediate. "That makes it infinitely more difficult."
Patrick let out a single, humorless puff of air."Not really. Nobility or not, he's a man. He breathes. He bleeds. He can be found." He scrubbed at a final, stubborn spot with sudden ferocity. "The only added complication is figuring out how to draw him into the light. To make him feel safe enough to show his face again. The actual dying part is the same for everyone."
The finality in his voice was absolute. Teresa absorbed it, the casual mention of planning a murder now draped in the cold cloth of justice. She gave the wall a last, decisive wipe. The oak was clean, pale wood emerging from the darkness. A ghost of a stain remained, a faint shadow in the grain, but it was done.
"Well, there," she said, sitting back to survey their work. "The servants will be impressed. Mrs. Reynolds was certain it would never come out."
Patrick blinked, looking from the wall to her face in genuine surprise. He had braced for more sympathy, for arguments about the sanctity of the peerage or the dangers of his plan. This mundane observation, this domestic approval, disarmed him completely. He didn't know what to say.
Teresa, meanwhile, tried to stand. Her legs, numb and prickling from hours on the floor, gave a violent shudder. She stumbled forward, catching herself against the newly cleaned wall with a soft thud, leaving a faint damp handprint.
Patrick was on his feet instantly, his hand shooting out to steady her elbow. "Teresa."
"I'm fine," she said, her voice tight with embarrassment. She gently but firmly extracted her arm from his grip. "My legs are just asleep. They'll wake up in a moment." She kept her hand flat on the wall for support, focusing on the tingling fire in her calves.
He hovered, his hand still half-outstretched, then withdrew. He bent and efficiently gathered the bucket, the filthy cloths, the empty vinegar bottle. "I'll take these to the kitchen," he said, his tone abruptly brisk. "You should head to the dining room. You need supper. Then rest. You've done enough today."
"I can manage the—"
"I'll have Cho stand in front of the library door if I have to." He cut her off, already moving toward the study door with the cleaning supplies in hand. He didn't look back. "You are a recovering patient. Act like one."
She shot a fierce glare at his retreating back, but he was already gone, the door clicking shut behind him. The room felt enormous and suddenly cold without him. She waited for the pins and needles in her legs to fade into a bearable ache, then pushed herself upright. A slow, careful walk to the dining room was less about weakness now and more about giving her thoughts room to settle.
The long mahogany table in the dining room was set for one. A single candle flickered in the center, casting lonely shadows on the polished surface. Grace appeared with a simple, hearty stew and a slice of bread.
"His Lordship asked for a tray in his room," Grace offered, sensing the unasked question as she set the bowl down. "Said he wasn't hungry, but I sent up some broth regardless."
"Thank you, Grace," Teresa said, her voice soft.
She ate alone, the scrape of her spoon loud in the quiet. The stew was good, but the disappointment was a tangible taste on her tongue. She had expected… not an apology, certainly. But his presence. Some continuation of the fragile, raw truce they’d forged on their knees. Instead, he’d retreated, walling himself back up with brusque orders. He was pretending to be a ghost again.
After a few forced bites, she pushed the bowl away. The tiredness was a physical weight, but beneath it hummed a new, restless energy.A peer. The son of a peer. The killer had a world, a structure, a name buried somewhere in those neat stacks of paper now lining the study.
She rose and walked not toward the library, but to the grand staircase. The hall outside Patrick's rooms was dark. No light bled from beneath his door. She stood for a moment, listening to the deep silence of the sleeping house.
Her own room felt too empty. She lit a single candle by her bedside and sat on the edge of the mattress, not yet ready to lie down. Her gaze fell on the modest bookshelf, filled with volumes from the convent—poetry, philosophy, a few novels. Words used to dissect the soul, or to soothe it.
His words echoed. He’s a man. He breathes. He bleeds. A plan was forming in that room down the hall. A dark, dangerous plan. And she was now, inextricably, a part of its quiet preamble.
Far below, in the kitchen yard, Cho finished rinsing the bucket and hung the rags to dry. He looked up at the manor, a black silhouette against the star-dusted sky. A single candle glowed in an upper window—Miss Lisbon’s. Another was lit faintly behind the heavy drapes of Lord Patrick’s study. Two separate points of light in the vast dark.
He stood for a long time, watching, until the light in the study window went out.