An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Child endangerment

House fires

Sex with dubious consent

Sex as coercion

Poisoning (thallium, arsenic)

Misuse of morphine

References to potential domestic violence

Transcript

APPRENTICE
Sir?

SIR
Yes?

APPRENTICE
You stayed.

SIR
Of course. I told you that I would.

APPRENTICE
Sorry.

SIR
Why?

APPRENTICE
I uh. I don’t know.

SIR
You speak when you rest, now.

APPRENTICE
I do?

SIR
Yes. That never used to happen, before.

APPRENTICE
You. You say stuff sometimes. Like that I’ve changed or. There’s things I don’t remember aren’t there?

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
Do we know each other?

SIR
I know you as well as I have ever known anything.

APPRENTICE
Do I know you?

SIR
From time to time.

APPRENTICE
What does that mean.

SIR
Exactly what I said.

APPRENTICE
I just– You keep almost saying things, and then you don’t actually say them, and I just can’t cope with it. I can’t.

SIR
I am selfish enough to keep you, but not selfish enough to make you suffer. Not intentionally. My failure is repeated and inevitable. I cherish those moments where you recognise this.

APPRENTICE
So you can be selfish?

SIR
I– I suppose.

APPRENTICE
You say you’re not a thing that knows, or feels, that you aren’t anything, but you’re here, I can see you, I can reach out and touch you if I–

SIR
Not like this.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
Do not reach out and touch me in anger. You would not like the ways I might be compelled to respond.

APPRENTICE
Why are you doing this to me?

SIR
He asks as though he is the one ensnared.

APPRENTICE
I am literally trapped! I–

No.

Let’s not. Let’s not.

SIR
Agreed.

PAUSE

APPRENTICE
What do I say, when I sleep?

SIR
Curiouser and curiouser.

APPRENTICE
What does that mean?

SIR
Indeed.

APPRENTICE
Where do they come from, the remnants?

SIR
Elsewhere.

APPRENTICE
Elsewhere than here?

SIR
Yes, and far beyond the limits your mind sets for you, and far beyond the reach of everything that exists here.

APPRENTICE
And what is here, exactly?

SIR
Remnants.

APPRENTICE
Right. And where are we?

SIR
The First and Last Place.

APPRENTICE
So. The remnants, they come from elsewhere, and here is the first and last, so elsewhere is… everything in between that?

SIR
Indeed.

APPRENTICE
And that’s what they’re remnants of?

SIR
They are remnants of specific pieces of everything else. They are what remains. This is the place for them.

APPRENTICE
Right.

SIR
Perhaps you are speaking of yourself, when you’re sleeping.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
You are certainly becoming more curious.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

So. You’re probably going to make me read another remnant?

SIR
Ah. Yes.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
I have been watching. It slipped my notice to think… yes. I will return with a remnant for you.

APPRENTICE
But. Aren’t you, like… I don’t know. Aren’t you sort of. Omniscient?

SIR
Ha! No. I can spread my awareness very thin. But…

APPRENTICE
But?

SIR
There is a limit to that.

APPRENTICE
Oh. Well. Couldn’t you have, I don’t know, spread your awareness whilst you were watching me?

SIR
I suppose.

APPRENTICE
But you didn’t.

PAUSE

SIR
No.

No matter. I will return with a remnant. Let me see…

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
Makes me shiver, when he does that.

MOVEMENT

THE DOOR UNLATCHES

APPRENTICE
Back so soon?

THE DOOR CREAKS.

APPRENTICE
Sir?

THE APPRENTICE GETS UP. HE WALKS TOWARDS THE DOOR AND THERE IS A SOUND OF SCUTTLING. THE CORRIDOR IS FULL OF THE DISTANT MECHANICAL SOUNDS OF THE FIRST AND LAST PLACE, AND A WHISTLING WIND.

APPRENTICE
What? What do you want?

A SOUND LIKE FALLING SAND, AND AMIDST IT, A SINGLE PAPER ITEM FLUTTERS.

APPRENTICE
I– wait. I’m taking this back with me.

THE APPRENTICE GRABS THE ENVELOPE AND TAKES IT BACK WITH HIM. HE OPENS IT AS HE WALKS.

APPRENTICE
There’s not even anything in it! Oh. Wait. There is. It’s a little glass vial. I think it’s empty, yeah and it– it’s, I— ah!

WHOOSH

Charlotte starts awake. It smells like she’s fallen asleep by the fire, but she’s curled up in hers and mama’s bed. She sits up, blinking into the dark, but mother isn’t lying beside her, which is odd, because Charlotte isn’t cold.

Charlotte swings her legs out of the bed, and her toes don’t feel an instant chill when they meet the floorboards. Charlotte rubs her eyes. She creeps out into the hallway, over to the bannister, where it hasn’t yet rotted away. The hallway is glowing orange.

‘Mother?’ Charlotte squeaks. She peers down into the entrance hall. Mother is standing with her sleeves rolled up, breathing heavily.

‘Put on your slippers,’ she whispers.

‘Why?’

‘Just put them on!’

Charlotte hurries back into their room and slips her feet into her slippers.

There are flames in the dining room, the kitchen, the parlour. Charlotte stands frozen, staring at her mother.

‘On second thoughts, take off your slippers. It should look like we left the house in hurry,’ says mother.

Charlotte kicks her slippers off. Her mother hauls them into the flames. She scoops Charlotte up into her arms.

‘Okay,’ she whispers. She kisses Charlotte on the cheek, and starts to scream as she runs out into the street.

WHOOSH.

Mother is outside with Charlotte’s second cousin. Charlotte is sat in the little chair by her window. It’s been four years since they bought the cottage with the money they got from the insurance after the fire. People were so kind, helping Charlotte and her mother by purchasing them furniture and offering to pay to have any pieces it was possible to save from Chatterley Manor restored. The fire damage on the bottom right post of Charlotte’s mahogany bed is now hardly noticeable.

She’s peering out of the window again. The second cousin’s son is stood a little ways down the garden, in perfect earshot of Charlotte’s mother and his own father. As if sensing Charlotte’s gaze on his back, he looks up and sees her peering from the window. He smiles. It’s a soft thing.

Charlotte smiles back.

Later that evening, they walk through the park at the end of the road.

‘Your home is. Modestly beautiful,’ says Anthony.

Charlotte laughs. ‘Small, you mean?’

Anthony splutters.

Charlotte hears her mother cluck her tongue a few feet behind her, where she’s following as chaperone.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Charlotte. ‘Chatterly manor was in a state of some disrepair. It’s a tragedy, what happened, but the cottage has more useable rooms.’

‘I didn’t realise,’ says Anthony.

Charlotte sighs. She sets her face into a smile. She glances back over her shoulder at her mother, who is watching intently, lips pursed, eyes wide. Charlotte raises her eyebrows in despair. Her mother dips her head to hide a laugh.

Charlotte returns to pretending to enjoy her conversation with Anthony, a little more sparkle in her fake laughs than before.

After Anthony and his father leave to spend the night in the hotel down the street, Charlotte and her mother do the dishes.

‘They’re rich,’ her mother says, for the eighth time in a row as a response to Charlotte’s complaints about Anthony’s insipidness, his need to please, his meekness.

‘He’s never even read a novel,’ Charlotte sighs.

Her mother runs a hand over her face. ‘When I was your age, reading novels would have made you less marriagable.’

Charlotte sticks out her tongue.

‘Its a good match, Lottie. Alright?’

Charlotte hangs her head. ‘What if he decides against me?’

‘He won’t,’ Charlotte’s mother says. ‘And if you’re worried. You could always take. Some measures.’

Charlotte’s hands still on the plate she is drying. ‘Measures?’

‘Go to the hotel. Be back before dawn. We are taking tea with the Matzners at eleven,’ her mother says.

Charlotte nods. Her heart is hammering in her chest.

She creeps out of the house and walks down the street. It’s eerily warm.

She stands outside the hotel, looking at the window she knows is on Anthony’s room. It’s flung wide open. After a moment, he appears in it, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

‘Evening,’ says Charlotte.

Anthony startles so badly the cigarette to the ground. ‘E—evening,’ he stammers back.

Charlotte closes her eyes. She can do this.

WHOOSH.

Charlotte thumbs the ribbon tied to the key to her flat before she drops it in the bowl beside the door. ‘No little madame tonight, madame?’ her maid asks, rushing over to take Charlotte’s coat.

‘No, she’s with her grandparents,’ Charlotte sighs.

‘Oui, madame,’ says the maid. ‘Is it just you that will be wanting to go eat?’

Charlotte considers this for a moment. ‘Perhaps. Would you draw me a bath? Oh, and lay out my gold dressing gown.’

The maid hesitates. ‘But, pardon, madame, will you not be going back out?’

Charlotte scoffs. She’s unpinning her hair. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

The maid stares at her, eyes wide. ‘Is it not monsieur’s wake this afternoon, madame?’

Charlotte sighs. ‘Can’t you see I’m too distraught to attend? Mother’s holding down the fort, anyway. Hardly matters. I have a hairpin headache.’

The maid stands there silent, staring at her. ‘Madame—’

‘I don’t pay you to have opinions,’ Charlotte snaps.

The maid nods and scuttles away.

A few seconds later, Charlotte hears the thunder of water hitting the tub. She sighs. She looks at her reflection in the mirror. She purposefully smudged her eye make-up before she left the house. It looks worse now, sunk into the crevices at the corners of her eyes. She had shaken so many people’s hands, heard so many apologies. People were crying, really genuinely crying. It was a shock to Charlotte that Anthony had ever made a strong enough impression on anyone that they’d cry at his funeral.

Charlotte goes into the bathroom. The air is thick with steam, heavy with scented oils. The bath water is scalding as Charlotte sinks into it.

‘Gabrielle?’ she calls.

She stares up at the scalloped ceiling. She’d had the place designed exactly to her desires. Anthony had never even visited. He preferred life in the countryside, with their soggy little daughter, Alice. She was too like her father.

Charlotte scoffs. She stirs the water with her hand. She thinks about Anthony’s face as she climbed on top of him the first time. She thinks of how he used to cup her chin when walked into the breakfast room in their country house, how he’d pluck her cigarette out of her mouth and tap her nose like she was a naughty puppy he couldn’t help but indulge.

Charlotte’s eyes start to prickle. But. No. She married him for the money. She needs to remember that.

Charlotte scrubs the tears from her cheeks. Her mother was right. He’d have left her eventually, and then she’d be in ruin. Sequestered off to some crumbling, forgotten estate, left to rot along with the plasterwork. Men like that, they’re all the same, mother says. Better a clean ending. He won’t feel a thing. He’ll feel a little under the weather and then he’ll just slip away. That’s what mother said.

Of course, it was more frightening than that. There was vomiting and delirium and fits and bedwetting and moments of fear so intense Charlotte swore he must have been seeing the devil. For days at the end every breath sounded like an effort. He lay there, lax in his joints, like wax poured over a skeleton.

The last time they’d visited, Charlotte’s mother told her she thought Anthony had a few weeks left.

Charlotte couldn’t bear it, not with the way he rattled when he breathed, with how he stank like he’d already started to decompose. So, she did him a kindness. His lungs were weak. Just little more than usual of his nightly dose of morphine, which he needed to keep him calm, and he was gone. He just fell asleep and stopped breathing.

‘Gabrielle! Wine!’ Charlotte croaks.

Gabrielle hurries into the bathroom. She bites her lip when she sees Charlotte is crying. ‘Madame?’

‘The good wine, please,’ says Charlotte.

‘Of course,’ says Gabrielle. She leaves and returns moments later with a very full glass of it.

‘Thank you,’ Charlotte whispers.

Gabrielle nods. ‘He was a nice man,’ she says.

Charlotte nods, too. She gulps her wine and sinks deeper into the water. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

WHOOSH.

The death of Charlotte’s third husband was a miscalculation. Over the years she has grown more convinced her mother was right about Anthony, and there would have been nobody who would have defended the second husband for even a minute if they’d seen his behaviour when they were in private. He was twenty years Charlotte’s senior, but you would think he were an actual child from the manner in which he conducted himself. He repulsed her. When he laid his hands on her, she would have to close her eyes and picture his net worth in stacks of gold bullions to get through it.

Charlotte had wanted something swift, with him, so she laced his laudanum with arsenic. She paid off some local sex workers to claim they’d seen him lurking in opium dens. Everyone knows that the opium sold in those down-market dens is poor quality, often cut through with lesser substances, and sometimes with poisons.

The police concluded her second husband’s death was likely an accident, and if it were deliberate, probably caused by some of the unsavoury clientele of his apparent haunts.

Husband number three had not committed any great offence like number two, nor was he particularly bothersome as a personality in the way Anthony had been. He was even older than husband number two. Older and richer. Charlotte probably should have waited ten years or so for him to pop off on his own.

She’d opted for her mother’s old favourite, thallium, like she’d used to kill Anthony, and Charlotte’s father back in the day. Likely others, but Charlotte didn’t want to think about that too hard.

Her mother was her fiercest supporter. Everything she did was to ensure Charlotte would have a better life. Even before Charlotte was born, before she was even conceived, her mother had been designing her future for her. She’d forged papers claiming she was some long-lost offspring of some lord or whatever. That was how she’d married Charlotte’s father. And she did all of that for Charlotte. So Charlotte wouldn’t have to suffer the way her mother had when she was young.

Like the first two, the match with husband number three had come at her mother’s recommendation and instruction. Her mother was a genius for constructing obligations. With Anthony, Charlotte slept with him and fell pregnant, locking him into their marriage. With husband 2, Charlotte kissed him at the opera, ensuring that it would be a social death if he did not then pursue the relationship.

With husband 3, she just… cared for him.

Charlotte had assumed, for a moment, that her mother had intended to marry him herself. The man was almost eighty.

‘He’s lonely,’ her mother told her, and she was right. He was miserable after the death of his wife and the marriage of his six daughters. He’d never had a son, but the promise of an heir had not been enough to tempt him into remarriage yet, so clearly their tactic had to be smarter than that.

Charlotte learned about the wars he’d fought in, about the people who designed the houses he lived in. She took an interest in his music, in the paintings he’d bought and hung, in the food he liked to eat. He liked to talk about the war with Germany, because he’d fought in the last one. ‘I hear they consulted you before they signed anything at Versailles,’ she said, and off he’d go, rambling, and she would smile and nod, needing only to intentionally recall one or two details to reflect back to him later on, so he would be assured she had been paying attention. And then they were married, and three weeks later, Charlotte’s mother was dead.

Her death was abrupt, a shock. One night she went to bed, the next morning she did not get up for breakfast.

Charlotte spent days numb. She was numb at the funeral as her new, ancient husband clutched her fingers in his shaking, arthritic hands.

She’d done everything for Charlotte. Who could Charlotte be, without her?

Her mother’s plan had been to get rid of husband number three as they had the first two.What better way to honour her mother’s memory than to use the same poison she’d started with? Just as she’d rid herself of Charlotte’s father years after the divorce. With Anthony it had taken months, over a year, for him to finally succumb to the thallium he’d been dosed with every day. A long, slow, painful and embarrassing decline.

Charlotte had expected the same of husband number three. She remembered from what she’d seen of their marriage paperwork that there were minimum terms on the third husband’s will. Her mother had remarked as they’d shared brandy afterwards that they were like the minimum sentence judges set for jail time. So Charlotte started poisoning her new husband ahead of when she knew she’d be able to get his money, so she’d have to serve as little time as possible.

If her mother were alive she’d have pointed out to Charlotte that a man in his eighties would no doubt succumb to poisoning far faster than a young man who enjoyed sports and the outdoors.

But Charlotte didn’t think of that. She thought she’d have months, and then would maybe have to end him as she did Anthony, out of pity.

No. A miscalculation. It had cost her over thirteen million pounds.

WHOOSH.

Charlotte thanks the courier and sits down at the little desk in the corner of the parlour.

Her new town house in London is beautiful. Her mother would be so proud if she’d seen it. The floors are parquet and polished and buffed so hard you could almost see your reflection in them. Every item in the house was specifically chosen, specially placed, decidedly to Charlotte’s tastes.

Most of the expense was covered by husband number four, dead three months, now.

Charlotte has been toying with the idea of simply leaving it at four. She is wealthy, now. Not one of the wealthiest widows in the city but definitely wealthy enough to be counted as the elite. Enough money and the rumours that Charlotte’s mother had faked their paperwork to claim she was a noblewoman and not a scullery maid seemed to melt like wax beneath a flame. Enough money that Charlotte’s existence was smooth, seamless, easy.

But, as her mother always said, money runs out. With few investments, Charlotte ought to be keeping a weather eye on new opportunities.

Unfortunately, for the past several weeks, the only man on Charlotte’s mind is incredibly ineligible. Or, well. She supposes. Perhaps not so ineligible to other women, but he certainly wasn’t possessed of a large enough fortune that it would make sense for him to be Charlotte’s next selection.

A young, trainee lawyer, with a sparkle in his dark eyes, like pools of rich tree-bark flecked with honey. He seemed at once both older and younger than he was.

He’d come along with his mentor, Carlisle Cratchet, to a party being held at the Standish-Coombes manor on Marylebone. His suit was not expensive, the cut of his hair looked cheap, and yet, he moved seamlessly between London’s socialites. He caught Charlotte’s eye precisely because he was not catching other people’s.

Charlotte spent hours watching him. He moved through the party with incredible, practised skill. It was remarkable to watch; a perfect balance of being likeable but unremarkable, dazzling but not blinding, ever watching that he kept his conversational treads light, so as not to stir the dust and draw too much attention to himself.

By the end of the evening this boy had spoken to people whose net-worth was seven, eight times Charlotte’s own. He had an easy, quiet charm. Unassuming.

Charlotte deliberately avoided engaging with him directly. The next day she set out to find out all she could about this boy. Edward Pocket, named for his father. Both parents killed in the blitz, he miraculously survived, pulled out of the rubble of his parents’ house by a neighbour. It was an interesting story but did nothing to explain to Charlotte anything about who this boy was. Moving through society is a skill Charlotte’s mother belaboured to her over many years. You do not learn those skills as the son of a lawyer. Where had he learned to do this?

So, Charlotte kept picking at it. The story grew more complex. He was an orphan, they said. So then it became a manner of finding where Pockets had acquired him from. Charlotte exploited every connection she thought might help, and finally, after so long, she discovered which orphanage he’d been taken from.

Charlotte wrote to them, and they responded last week with the most bizarre answer, so bizarre Charlotte could not have anticipated it.

The orphanage had been trying to find Edward Pocket for a while a few years previously, but they thought he was dead. They were looking for him because he was left with them by a woman who claimed he was the illegitimate son of an incredibly wealthy lord, Theodore du Perier. They were looking for Edward because Theodore had been looking for an heir. He’d fallen ill, and had recalled this woman he had slept with who had come to him for money to raise his baby. He gave her a hundred pounds in exchange for dropping the baby at an orphanage of good repute and telling nobody of his parentage. She’d ignored him and left the baby at the orphanage with proof of his connect to the du Periers.

Charlotte had wondered, after that first reply, if maybe there was simply something in Edward’s blood that predisposed him to lordliness. She didn’t really believe that nonsense, so she wrote back to the orphanage; ‘Edward is alive and well, to my knowledge? There seems to have been a mistake with the death certificate. I would love to put you in contact with him. Do you have any further information I can share with him before I do?’

And now Charlotte was opening their response. Here, the paperwork proving Edward’s adoption by the Pockets. Here a letter written to him from his mother, which he had never been shown, which explains his origins, with proof in the form of a bank receipt confirming the transfer of funds from Theodore du Perier’s account into hers.

At the bottom, under everything else, is a photograph. The baby Edward is very small, beaming broadly at the camera. His hair is lighter than the Edward Pocket Charlotte met, but of course, this can change over time. As can the shape of the face, the precise set of the grin. What cannot change was the blistering, icy blue of this baby’s eyes. All babies are born with blue eyes, Charlotte knows, but not blue like this, and he’s too old for these to be baby blues.

The Edward Pocket Charlotte had met those weeks ago had those deep, memorable eyes. As far from blue as you could get.

Charlotte laughed out loud.

Edward Pocket is a fraud.

WHOOSH

Charlotte sits down opposite Edward. His smile is warm, revealing nothing. Is she imagining the duplicity in his eyes, because of what she knows? It’s impossible to say.

It’s been almost a year since she first worked out he was a fraud. She’s paid half-attention to him since, trying to focus on other things, but like water circling the drain—-

WHOOSH

SIR
(booming, distorted)
STOP.

APPRENTICE GASPS, HORRIFIED. HE FALLS. GLASS TINKLES TO THE GROUND.

SIR
Where did you find this?!

APPRENTICE
(pained, struggling to get the words out)
In– envelope.

SIR
ARGH.

THE APPRENTICE SOUNDS LIKE HIS WRITHING ON THE GROUND, MOVING SIDE TO SIDE, HIS CLOTHES RUSTLING.

SIR
No, no. I don’t want to lose you.

APPRENTICE
Wh– what are you talking about?! Why does my– why does my head hurt so much– why— oh god. Oh god. Look at you. Look at you.

Oh, I–

I see, I see you.

SIR
I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
A thousand moths settling on my bones, I see you, I know you, I under– I understand I, ah. Why are these— torn edges in me?!? Where is. Where is the rest of me?!

SIR
It was a mistake. I have tried to rectify it but I can’t. I can’t!

APPRENTICE
Mmmmhhhhnnnnn –what have you done to me?! Why are you keeping me here?!

SIR
I have no answers for you.

APPRENTICE
WHY NOT!

SIR
I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
No!

SIR
I cannot let you bear this pain.

APPRENTICE
No, NO!

THE APPRENTICE THRASHES, TRYING TO GET AWAY

SIR
I will make it better. It will be as though it never happened.

APPRENTICE
But it’s– it’s me, it’s part of me, I— ah!

SIR
Sleep, dear Apprentice.

APPRENTICE SIGHS AND COLLAPSES AT ONCE, FALLING STILL

SIR
There you are.

FABRIC RUSTLES SOFTLY, AS THOUGH SIR HAS PULLED THE APPRENTICE TO HIS CHEST.

SIR
I have you. I have you. Sleep now, and forget.

APPRENTICE HMMS SOFTLY

SIR
Be grateful that you are able to forget. If only I were able to. I am so sorry.

FABRIC RUSTLES AS SIR SETS THE APPRENTICE DOWN AGAIN, CAREFULLY

SIR
There you go. I won’t let it hurt anymore. Rest now, Apprentice. Rest. Dream sweet dreams.

WHOOSH

TICKING

THE APPRENTICE GASPS, SUDDENLY. HE THRASHES, STRUGGLING, PULLING HIMSELF ALONG THE FLOOR, SOBBING AND MOANING PERIODICALLY. THE DOOR OPENS AND HE FALLS AGAIN WITH A GASP OF PAIN.

A SOUND LIKE SAND FALLING

APPRENTICE
(weakly)
Help.

SCUTTLING SOUNDS, MORE FALLING SAND OR DUST

APPRENTICE
(desperate)
Please. Before he comes back.

THE SOUND OF DUST GETS LOUDER AND LOUDER.

END

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