The Death Chamber by Sarah Rayne

war ended. It was not unusual to encounter such behaviour and there might be ways that he, McNulty, could help. Seeing Lewis’s slight frown, he said
smoothly that he had colleagues who might guide her thoughts onto more positive paths.
    Lewis, thinking McNulty referred to psychiatrists, and disliking the rather flowery references to souls and spirits going ahead, said, non-committally, that he was most grateful for the advice
and he would think it over.
    It had not, of course, been possible to tell McNulty that one of the stages in Clara’s mourning appeared to be an inflexible chastity. After an enforced celibacy of almost six months Lewis
had made a tentative move to share his wife’s bed again, only to be met with flat rejection. Her life was devoted now to the memory of her beloved boy, said Clara, and she was surprised and
rather saddened to discover that Lewis could contemplate anything of such an
earthy
nature. This was said with a delicate shudder and the implication that it was insensitive and even
rather coarse of him to have made such an approach. Intimacy, said Clara, with her maddening air of closing a subject, was quite out of the question; Lewis must understand that.
    What Lewis understood was that Clara – never overly impressed by the physicality of marriage was locking her bedroom door for good. It did not come as much of a surprise; the marriage had
been lukewarm from the start, but it had been entered into in the days when such things were still as much a matter of business as anything else. The young people of today would express incredulity
and derision at such an outlook – Cas, if he had lived, would probably have done so, and so, Lewis thought, would Walter Kane – but in the closing years of the nineteenth century it was
how people had behaved: your money, my title. Clara had been very pleased to become Lady Caradoc, and Lewis had been very pleased with the marriage settlement made by her wealthy merchant banker
family.
    He supposed he would have to accept Clara’s embargo – he was damned if he was going to knock humbly on his own wife’s bedroom door again, especially when there were other
bedroom doors he might knock on and be reasonably sure of finding them unlocked. There were probably not many possibilities for that in Thornbeck, but despite his work at Calvary he was in London
quite often; Clara’s money made that possible, of course, just as it made the upkeep of the small elegant house in Cheyne Walk possible.
    He had begun to consider which bedroom doors he would try, when the next stage of Clara’s mourning presented itself. It was a stage that startled Lewis very much indeed.

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN

    November 1917
    ‘Lewis,’ Clara said, ‘the most remarkable thing has happened.’
    It must be very remarkable indeed because it had brought Clara into Lewis’s study, a room whose existence she normally ignored, apart from regularly asking when he was going to discard the
disreputable leather chairs and the battered desk because guests would think they could not afford good furniture. A nice chintz from Liberty’s, and one of those fumed oak desks with a
leatherette top, said Clara. It would be much easier to clean. She did not, of course, do any cleaning of the house herself but she was strict with the two housemaids and could not abide an
undusted surface or a badly swept carpet. Lewis had given up saying he liked his study as it was; the chairs and the desk had belonged to his father and been part of the library. The desk still
bore the inkstain where his father had knocked over the inkpot. Cas, when he was very small, had said the mark was the shape of an elephant, and had made up a story about a miniature elephant that
lived in the desk and had built itself a house from pens and inkpots and writing paper.
    Two weeks earlier Dr McNulty had persuaded Clara to leave Thornbeck and the sad stone monument in the churchyard for the livelier environs of London and