An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Implications of child abandonment
• Descriptions of terminal illness
• References to war
• References to parent loss
• Discussions of suicide
• References to spousal abuse
• References to child murder
• Mention of death in childbirth

Transcript

[DRIPPING, AND OMINOUS HUMMING, DRONING SOUNDS]

SIR
Apprentice? There is a remnant I want to show you.

APPRENTICE
Oh?

SIR
Yes. I found it in this room, you see. Whilst I was reflecting.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
You do not seem enthused.

APPRENTICE
Sorry.

SIR
There is no need to be. I think it is here because I would not show you it before. It is one I would not allow you to see, I think. And I think I know why.

APPRENTICE
Why?

SIR
You will have to read it to see.

APPRENTICE
It’s… It’s a stack of pages. Is this. It’s not me, is it? Not pages torn from me? I don’t want to look more at those. Not right now. Please.

SIR
The edges are not torn.

APPRENTICE
Oh. Right. So they’re not mine? Not my pages…

SIR
No. They’re not.

APPRENTICE
So why—

SIR
You have to read them to understand, I think.

APPRENTICE
Okay? Uh. They’re… documents, of some kind? The words are typewritten, but it’s almost like they’re written over dozens of times, so many different words typed over one an another I can hardly see what they— what any of them—

[WHOOSH]

‘Come now, dear,’ Aunt Pearl calls. Eliza peers up from the book she has been reading.
‘Has the gentleman gone?’ she asks.
‘Yes dear, indeed he has.’
Eliza tries to hide her disappointment.
‘You liked him?’
Eliza nods. Aunt Pearl laughs and strokes her cheek.
‘Pretty thing, wasn’t he? Hmm. Well. He’s given me much to think about. How would you like to go on a little trip?’
Eliza tries not to let herself smile to widely; she knows it’s impolite. ‘Yes please, Aunt Pearl!’
‘Wonderful. Then I shall begin making plans immediately.’

[WHOOSH]

Eliza wakes up and she has stopped crying. It is a surprise for a moment, causes a little flutter of panic in her chest. She scrubs at her dry cheeks. Dreadful. It’s only been three days since Aunt Pearl left her. If she stops crying, the people who say they are her grandparents will think she’s happy, and they won’t let her go home. When they showed her this big, beautiful bedroom with the huge dollhouse in the corner she’d been so excited. Even more excited when she was told she’d be allowed to stay in it. But she thought it might be for just a few nights, now it seems like it’s going to be forever, and Aunt Pearl is gone and she is never ever coming back.
The breath stutters in Eliza’s chest. Her eyes prickle and she feels tears on her cheeks again.
The bedroom door cracks open.
‘Are you awake?’ The woman who says she’s her grandmother asks.
Eliza sniffles and lies still under her blankets. The door creaks just slightly as it is pushed open.
‘You know, this was your mother’s room, when she was small,’ says her grandmother.
Eliza stares at the ceiling. ‘My mother is dead.’
‘I know, darling,’ says her grandmother. ‘But this was her bedroom when she was a little girl, just like you. And you are so like her.’
Eliza peers warily over the blankets on her bed. ‘What was her name?’
‘Your Aunt Pearl never told you?’
Eliza shakes her head.
‘Well, her name was Harriet. But we called her Hattie.’
‘Hattie?’ asks Eliza. ‘Like what you wear on your head?’
Her grandmother chuckles. ‘Something like that, yes. Like we call you Lizzie. A part of her name, but shorter and a little sweeter.’
‘Do you call me Lizzie?’ Eliza asks.
‘Well, we should like to, if that’s alright?’
Eliza considers for a moment. She decides she does not mind it either way. That maybe here she can be Lizzie and live Lizzie’s life and when she goes home she’ll get to be Eliza again. ‘Alright,’ she whispers.

[WHOOSH]

It’s a cold winter morning and everything looks like it’s covered in powdered sugar, turning the gravestones into large, grey chunks of peculiar Turkish delight sticking out of the frozen grass. Lizzie’s nose is cold and she wonders why nobody has thought to think of hats for them. She asks her grandpa and he gives a little laugh and answers, ‘well, don’t you think it might make it harder to blow it when it runs?’
Lizzie frowns, swinging their joined hands. ‘You could put a tissue inside the hat and then you wouldn’t have to.’
‘Hmm, perhaps we should call the patent office,’ her grandpa laughs.
Lizzie looks down at her shiny shoes, wondering what varnished leather has to do with hats for noses.
‘Here we are, pet,’ says her grandpa, like he does when they turn down the path past the bench. Her mother’s grave is in the second row of stones. Lizzie plucks last week’s flowers from the vase so her grandpa can set down the fresh ones, then skips over to right her brother’s teddy bear. It’s made of stone so the weather can’t get it, but Lizzie likes him better if there’s a nice proper ribbon hiding the stone one. Stone bears can’t be very cuddly, so she makes she she has a new one in her pocket in case the old one has started looking tatty so she can swap it out.
‘This one is yellow, I hope you don’t mind that,’ says Lizzie. ‘I don’t know what your favourite colour was, after all, so we’ll have to make do, won’t we grandpa?’
‘Yes, pet, that we will.’
She repeats him as she ties the new ribbon in place in a smart bow, like Uncle Geoffrey taught her. ‘He’s in the navy and he knows much better bows than the ones you tie your shoes with,’ she tells Max. ’This one is simple, he says, but I can never make the loops get quite right.’
‘I think it looks perfectly splendid,’ says her grandpa.
‘Aren’t splendid things always perfect?’ Lizzie asks. Her grandpa’s smile gets wobbly at the edges and he takes off his glove before he pets her cheek.
‘Not quite, pet. Not quite.’

[WHOOSH]

The grandfather clock is obscenely loud. Lizzie wonders how she’s never noticed that before. Ticking, ticking, ticking. It’s absolutely relentless. Does it not understand the gravity of this moment? How is it that each second could be so loudly marked and yet whenever she glances at its obnoxious face, barely a minute has passed?
Finally, after an age, the door to her grandpa’s study opens. He has been laid up on the day bed in there for a week. He said he didn’t want to disturb her grandma with his coughing and sweating, but then he became too ill to make it up the stairs, and then too ill to get out of the daybed at all.
It all seemed to happen so quickly. Yes, he’s always had something rough on his lungs, ever since the war, grandma says. He fought on the Somme, as he’s told Lizzie so many times, and inhaled a lot of mustard gas. He went temporarily blind. Couldn’t see a damn thing for six months, he always says, and her grandma always scolds him with a fond little smile.
She wishes he would tell the story again now. That he would march out of the office still half in his thoughts and would start rambling about was dreadful and pointless the whole endeavour had felt, even to him. How his father and shoved him out the door, told him too many years of peace had softened up the youth something terrible: a good war would toughen them up
The door to the study finally opens. It is not, as Lizzie hopes, her grandpa, pipe in his mouth, book under his arm, looking for someone to share an anecdote with. It is the young doctor from town, and his face is very serious. ‘I’d not move him, Mildred. If the fever were to break, perhaps it might be safe to take him to the hospital but before that I wouldn’t risk it.’
‘Oh, no dear, no. We shouldn’t be doing a thing like that anyway. He’d never forgive me. No. He should be amongst his books, in a place he knows.’
The doctor nods and glances over at Lizzie. ’Spend some time with him this evening, Eliza, won’t you?’
Lizzie nods, trying not to shudder. The only person who ever calls her Eliza is her wretched father.
Lizzie’s father had showed up yesterday, burst right into her grandpa’s study. Dreadful thing it was, as though he could not see he grandpa was blue around the mouth, could not hear the rattling wheeze that followed his every breath, like his chest was full of coins and bits of wood. Nobody was dressed for guests, but Lizzie’s father didn’t care about that, and in fact had been told dozens of times not to come to the house. He pushed poor Charlie, the doorman, right onto the path to get in this time.
The doctor leaves and Lizzie’s grandma announces she is going to have Etta put on a pot of tea, making a big show of smiling like it might disguise the tears in her eyes.
Lizzie creeps into the study. She sits down beside the daybed without looking at her grandpa. ’Say, do you remember when you were on the Somme?’
Her grandpa doesn’t stir.
‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ Lizzie continues.

[WHOOSH]

‘How on earth do you expect to manage her alone?’ Lizzie’s father is shouting in the drawing room. Lizzie does her best not to make eye contact with Minnie, who has been dusting the phone on the occasional table for almost a full five minutes, now, head inclined towards the drawing room doors.
‘Manage her?!’ Lizzie’s grandma shouts, and she has never heard such venom in her voice. ‘That girl is a blessing. Where on earth would you think you could keep her, anyway? There’s certainly no room in that filthy little apartment of yours. Besides, how will she continue with her studies if you move her so far away from school?’
‘I don’t know what need she has of such an education anyway,’ Lizzie’s father hisses.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Stephen, it’s 1975, not 1800! Women are allowed an education without permission from their deadbeat fathers! Lizzie wants to be an academic, like her grandfather. It’s a pursuit of passion and knowledge. You see no value in anything if it doesn’t net you a fortune.’
‘She doesn’t need a fortune! She already has one waiting for her.’
‘So what harm is there in letting her pursue what she wants to?!’
‘If her schooling is so important, then I should move in here,’ says her father, bold as brass. ‘It’s not right, two women trying to run a grand old house like this.’
‘Well if it weren’t for you there’d be a number more of us, wouldn’t there?’
‘You can’t be suggesting I had something to do with what happened to Tobias?! It was pneumonia.’
‘Of course I am not suggesting that,’ says Lizzie’s grandma, suddenly very quiet. She sounds like cat, somehow. Small, but armed, knives on every limb and sabres in her mouth.
‘Don’t make me tell you again, Mildred.’
‘You forfeit your right to call me that when you killed my daughter,’ Lizzie’s grandma hisses.
Lizzie blinks. Her concentration on not meeting Minnie’s gaze broken, she finds herself staring right at her, at the round little o her mouth has become.
‘Kill her? Kill her?!’ Lizzie’s father barks. ‘She was a loon, a nutcase, a—’
‘Don’t you dare disgrace my poor Harriet. I knew her before she was born, nursed her on my own chest. I saw how she was with those children. I know she tried to escape you, that she would have if you’d only allowed it, but you couldn’t stand it, could you? And you’d made it impossible for us to reach her.’
‘She murdered her own children!’ Lizzie’s father spits.
Lizzie looks down at herself. She smoothes her dress. She wonders if she ought to run upstairs and find a better pair of shoes to hear this news in. What an absurd thought, especially as her knees somehow don’t want to take her weight.
‘Careful, now,’ Minnie whispers, catching Lizzie’s arm.
On the other side of the door they are still arguing but the words are all soup, grandma and father running into one another like vinegar in a bucket of cream.
Minnie sits Lizzie on the chair in her grandpa’s study.
‘I’ll fetch you something to drink,’ says Minnie.
‘Brandy, I think,’ says Lizzie.
‘I’m not sure your grandmother would—‘
‘Brandy, please, Minnie.’
Minnie purses her lips, but nods before she leaves the room.
Lizzie stares at the day bed where her grandpa died. She thinks of his warm hand when it was still large enough to engulf hers completely. She thinks of the graves in the cemetery, the words on her mother’s headstone. Beloved daughter, doting wife, cherished mother. She has seen photographs of her. There’s one in the hallway of when she was sixteen, another in the sitting room from when she was twenty two. No photographs of the wedding. None of her father at all.
The front door slams closed before Minnie brings Lizzie her drink. She sips it, lets the warm sweetness of it spread over her tongue.
When her grandma comes in, she stops short. ‘Lizzie. I thought you were out.’
‘I wish I had been.’
Her grandma raises a wrinkled hand to cover her mouth. ‘You did— you didn’t hear? Oh, my lovely girl. I’m sorry.’
‘Is it true?’ Lizzie whispers. ‘Did my mother kill my siblings?’
Her grandma sits by the window. Outside, the sun is shining, twinkling light reflecting on the little koi pond on by patio.
‘She drowned them, and herself,’ says Lizzie’s grandma. ‘But you must understand, Lizzie. What he did to her. She felt she had no way out.’
‘Every week, my whole life, I’ve been laying flowers on the grave of a killer,’ says Lizzie.
‘We’d been planning to tell you when you turned eighteen. That was old enough, we thought, that you might understand what happened a little better. I tried to understand it, to overcome it, but it was not until your aunt Pearl came to me with you that I understood. He had pushed her to that. She’d tried to leave and he’d gone after her. She wrote to us, you see, but— but she never sent them. She believed it to be hopeless. I have the letters. Your aunt—‘
‘I don’t care about what my dead aunt said!’ Lizzie snaps. ‘She abandoned me here, she never replied to my letters until she thought she was going to die, and even then it was to summon me back like I’m sort of collie dog. Well, at least now I understand it. Of course she wanted rid of me.’
‘She was trying to keep you safe!’
‘From what?!’
‘Your father. She didn’t leave him a penny in the will. Do you understand that? Not a penny.’
Lizzie does not care. She downs the rest of her brandy in one and marches up to her bedroom. Everything feels ridiculous, the lace voile over the window, the heavy rust-coloured curtains over top. The bed frame, the armoire, the dressing table, the stool. All of it is so silly she cannot bear it. It’s just so ridiculous. She wishes she could take her brain out of her head and rinse off the knowledge. She wishes her mother had had the foresight to kill her, too.

[WHOOSH]

The drawing room door creaks open and Lizzie glares up from the papers she’s been desperately trying to read for the last hour.
‘Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you. We’re moving on to the study across the hall now and—‘
Lizzie holds up a hand to silence the builder. ‘I thought there wasn’t any damp in there?’
‘So did we, but looking at the walls in the adjoining rooms, if we don’t treat the plaster now, it’ll progress through them.’
‘Right. So there’s no way around it?’
‘No, ma’am. The interior walls will need stripping back and treating. We’ve started on moving the books, with proper protocols in place and—‘
‘Well stop what you’re doing and put everything back, I want to inventory it all first. Some of those books are very valuable.’
‘Yes, ma’am. We did find an inventory in one of the desk drawers. The desk itself is what I wanted to ask you about. We can treat the room with it in situ, but it’ll mean moving it around a lot and it’s quite heavy at the moment. It’d be easier to get it up onto a sheet if you moved the paperwork out of it first. So we don’t damage the floor you know.’
Lizzie considers for a moment, then nods. ‘Alright. Well, continue work elsewhere in the house this afternoon and I’ll review that inventory this evening, check that it’s still accurate, and make sure everything is removed from the desk by the time you arrive tomorrow.’
The builder nods. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He gives an awkward little bow and hurries out of the drawing room. Lizzie cannot get into any of her work for the rest of the day. Dreadful, considering she’s got an entire stack of work from her students to sift through by the end of the month. In her defence, it’s quite hard to concentrate on papers about the collapse of the Roman Empire when the builders keep playing Depeche Mode and Wham so loudly on the radio. The stack of those she’s not even glanced through watch accusatorially whenever she comes back into the room after checking the builders have indeed left her grandpa’s study alone.
When they finally leave, it’s almost six o’clock. Lizzie takes her dinner into the study, sits in her grandpa’s big chair behind his desk, and feels guilty about the smell of dust and must that rises from it when she does. He’d be upset with her for having let the place get into such a state. She has the maids clean in here only once a week, comes in herself only when she knows there’s a book in here that she can’t find in the library.
Chewing a bite of her sandwich, she unlocks one of cupboards on the desk’s base. It creaks a little as it opens. Inside, three shelves, eat with a neat stack of paper. The top one is all the notes for the paper her grandpa had been planning to write before he died. The middle shelf has accounting for the household dating back some sixty years. On the bottom, it’s all important documents regarding the family. His and her grandma’s passports. Her own birth certificate, and her mother’s. A copy of her Aunt Pearl’s will. It’s the first time she’s seen it since she turned eighteen and came into her inheritance. She’d wondered about the other documents it references, locked in some safe at Aunt Pearl’s solicitors’ offices in London, and she wonders about them again now. What could preclude her father from entitlement to her Aunt’s money, but not her?
Her grandpa seems to have wondered the same thing. He has underlined the sections where the documents are mentioned, added question marks in the margins besides. Underneath his marked up copy of the will, she finds a copy her father’s death certificate. Her grandpa had been dead for years before he died. Her grandma must have put this in here before she passed away, too. Lizzie frowns at the date, April 1981. She didn’t find out he was dead until two weeks before the funeral, which definitely happened in August of 1982. She didn’t go, of course. How peculiar.
Under the copy of the certificate, another document. An autopsy report on her father’s body. She has to skip most of it, turning the stapled-together pages until she gets to the conclusion at the end; the coroner determines the death to be a suicide by gunshot to the head.
Lizzie sits staring at the conclusion for a moment before closing the report and clearing her throat. Good, she thinks. She takes all the paperwork and sorts it into boxes. Most of it is worth keeping. She’ll put it back into her grandpa’s desk when the men have finished with their cleaning.

[WHOOSH]

The offices of Cratchett, Pocket and Feldman are bustling with activity. Keys clack against a hundred keyboards in the vast, open plan space, the sound like rainfall on the roof of a car. The young woman she’s been sent to speak with, Emily, squints at her computer monitor, the screen reflected in her glasses like a square moon.
‘Yes, I can see here we should still have the paperwork in question, but it’s not been digitised. I don’t have any log of it except a note about the safe itself when it was moved from our old offices in the 70s. Umm… Barb? Where would that be, do you reckon?’
The woman at the desk behind Emily’s turns around, her cheeks inflated as she muses over the question. ‘I think all the stuff in the old lockboxes is in Basement Two? But I couldn’t say.’
‘Right,’ Emily looks slightly withered.
‘Basement Two?’ Lizzie asks.
‘Yes, it’s… ah. it’s a bit disorganised.’
‘So you wouldn’t be able to get the documents from it?’
Emily blinks. ‘No, of course, it just might take a little while.’
‘Well, I’m only in the city today. Next week I’m teaching in Michigan, there’s really no way I can delay this.’
‘You could leave us an address?’ says Emily, hopefully.
‘I’d really rather have them in person. I don’t want to take them with me, if possible.’
Emily’s shoulders sag. ‘Right. Well, I can get Kevin to take you down there now? There’s no guarantee that—‘
Lizzie beams. ‘That sounds perfectly splendid, thank you.’
She waits at Emily’s desk until Kevin comes to find her. He’s a small, pale man who has the cheeky smile of a school boy and the nervous energy of a rabbit during hunting season. He takes Lizzie downstairs in a rickety elevator.
The ceilings of the basement corridor are covered in pipes and ducts that hang so low that Lizzie wonders if Kevin’s height was the primary reason he was hired; anyone over five foot six would surely bang their head at least once a day down here, or develop scoliosis from bending over.
They pass the door for Basement One. Through the glass panels, Lizzie sees neat rows of locked cabinets in the dim light. Basement Two, however, looks like an antique shop. An ancient sofa greets them as they enter, a bust of some aspirational businessman glowering up from its cushions. There are picture frames leaning against wooden cupboard, their top edges thick with dust. Right at the back of the room, past candelabras and hat stands and sculptures and armoires, is a collection of safes. Some of them look well over a hundred years old. Kevin goes right up to one of them, made of iron and with a large, circular handle on the door, like those that open the airlocks on a submarine.
Kevin puts in the code, then waits a moment. ‘You’ve got to treat her like a lady,’ he says, grinning as he hefts the handle sideways. It screeches at it turns, setting Lizzie’s teeth on edge. When the door swings open, though, it’s completely silent. Inside, a collection of small boxes wrapped in paper, tied with string, sat upon document wallets. Kevin sifts through them, before sliding one free. ‘Here you are. I think that’s what you were after.’
‘That didn’t take very long.’
Kevin shrugs. ‘The people upstairs treat requests for things in Basement Two as though they require an intrepid mission. I admit, I take advantage of that. But as you were keen on coming down yourself, I thought, may as well. You want to take those upstairs? We can have copies made for you.’
‘That won’t be necessary, thank you.’ Lizzie slides the documents free. There is an old paper clip fastening them together, a note at the top with her Aunt Pearl’s name on it. There’s another copy of the will. From the look of the ink, she suspects it is the original. Underneath, she finds a set of doctor’s notes. Aunt Pearl’s mother had a hysterectomy after the birth of her third child, Eliza.
Eliza. She must have been named for her. How strange that nobody would tell her. She turns the page; there is a copy of her father’s birth certificate, listing Aunt Pearl’s parents as his, but… the dates. They conflict. Her father cannot be Aunt Pearl’s brother; her great grandmother had no uterus to have birthed him from. Then, a copy of a death certificate, this one belonging to the original Eliza. The cause of death is listed as haemorrhage during childbirth.
Lizzie blinks. But then, if he was her namesake’s son, surely he would still be entitled to the Grenville fortune when he died?
She turns another page. A copy of a ship’s manifest. Aunt Pearl’s father is listed as an officer on board. Some dates have been underlined; the ship left Southhampton in June of 1918 and did not return to England until September. Then, a copy of the first Eliza Grenville’s birth certificate. She is born in April of 1919 at 8lbs exactly. Eliza Grenville was not a Grenville.
That means Lizzie isn’t either.
The final document of the stack is a typewritten letter where her Aunt Pearl formally claims her, Eliza Stephanie Grenville, as the sole heir to her home and fortune. Cosigned by a solicitor’s apprentice named Edward Pocket.
‘Edward Pocket,’ Lizzie reads aloud. ‘Like from the name of the firm?’
Kevin frowns. ‘Oh, yes! That must be the miracle boy!’
‘Miracle boy?’
‘Mm. Grandson of one of the firm’s founders. His parents were killed in the Blitz and they thought the boy was dead for days until they pulled him out of the rubble. Took him months to recover. Then, it turned out that he was adopted, and he was actually heir to some lord’s fortune! Ended up marrying some French heiress.’
‘Goodness,’ says Lizzie. ‘What happened next?’
‘Well, nobody’s really sure. He disappeared in the 60s. Nobody’s seen or heard of him until—Oh, god! If you’re here about Pearl Grenville’s stuff, my god, you must be— are you Eliza Stephanie?!’
‘Yes?’ said Lizzie, feeling more than a little apprehensive.
‘You’re— my my! My my. We tried to look for you a few years ago, but you said you had no interest in anything regarding your father—‘
‘I don’t. If he had money, I don’t want it. The state can keep it.’
‘Well.’ Kevin turns to another of the safes. ‘I shouldn’t really show you this, to be honest, but I don’t think he’d have minded, and he’s too dead to complain about it now. Plus it’s relevant, and you’re here, so.’ The safe is less fiddly than the one Aunt’s Pearl’s things had been stored in. Kevin takes out an envelope. Inside, a will with a huge remit of instructions written on it. ‘We received this in the post, or, well, the firm did, in the 1980s. It was before my time.’
‘At the following residences you will find safes containing the approximate total sum of three million, seven hundred and twenty six thousand pounds in cash, plus assets totalling in value approximately two million, four hundred thousand pounds, itemised in section eight. There are also seven properties under my ownership, totalling an approximate value of two million, five thousand pounds, with particulars and valuations provided in sections nine through sixteen.
‘It is my wish that in the event of my death, these assets are allocated as follows.’
For the next several pages, the Lord Edward du Perier outlines almost twenty people who are to receive some portion of his estate. The last person named, and the only one whose allocation does not come with a note of explanation to be passed along with when they receive the money, items, or houses, is Lizzie’s father, to whom he leaves an album of photographs.
‘I’d never made a connection to the Pearl Grenville will before, but that must be it! Edward Pocket cosigned his loss of entitlement to his inheritance. Suppose that goes some way to explain things! Of course, by the time we got around to implementing the will, your father was dead, and you promptly let us know you had no interest in anything to do with your father’s estate, so.’
‘And when did he die, this Edward Pocket or du Perier, whatever his name was?’
‘1981. In rural North Wales, of all places. We have a copy of the death certificate is in Basement One, if you’d like to see it?’
‘No, no, that won’t necessary,’ says Lizzie. ‘The album my father was meant to receive. Is that here, too?’
‘Ah, yes! Give me a moment.’
Kevin wiggles his way between the stacked up furniture over to the edge of the room. From behind a huge landscape partially obscured by a sheet, he pulls out a small leather book. Inside, there are unlabelled photographs. Men and women, all smiling from the glossy paper. Lizzie pauses on the fourth page. An image of her mother, with her brother on her lap, and a little girl beside her who looks so much like Lizzie had when she was younger that her stomach lurches. But it cannot be her. She was born the night her mother died, cut from her womb as she lay dead on the grass by her Aunt Pearl’s pond. This girl is her sister, who she never knew. Who she never even knew existed.
‘Who are these people?’ Lizzie whispers, turning another page, finding more smiling photographs.
‘I don’t know, I’m afraid,’ says Kevin. ‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell me, actually.’
Lizzie puts the book down.
Kevin frowns. ‘You don’t want to take it?’
Lizzie shakes her head. ‘Burn it for all I care.’

[WHOOSH]

[WHIRRING, TICKING, CLICKING, AND AN OMINOUS WIND]

[THE APPRENTICE GASPS]

APPRENTICE
Where’s the rest?

SIR
That is all of it.

APPRENTICE
No, no, she’s not dead, she hasn’t— we’re not at the end! I need to know who—

SIR
This is the remnant we have. This part of her. It’s all that is here. I think I have looked among the dust for more. Found some which speak of her, to her. She was married. She had children of her own. She lived to be an old woman. But that is all I can say.

APPRENTICE
Why?!

SIR
I wonder if this is what she means for you to see, Apprentice, or if, perhaps, it is what you most need to. Look around us. Look at the shelves. Do you see how little remains? I did not want you to see it before.

APPRENTICE
But why not?! Why not. This doesn’t tell me anything useful, except that I ruined Stephen Grenville’s life the exact way he said I did, but I already knew that!

SIR
Do you not think it tells you something else?

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
You saved his daughter.

APPRENTICE
By killing her fucking mother?

SIR
Harriet Grenville died by her own will, the only escape she was still capable of, an act of desperation. You let Lizzie’s Aunt set her free. Do you understand that?

APPRENTICE
No.

SIR
Well. Failing that, can you not see something else?

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
The album at the end. The photographs.

APPRENTICE
She didn’t know what any of them were.

SIR
No. But you did. You did, and you wanted Stephen Grenville to see that you did. Can you remember why?

APPRENTICE
…no.

SIR
You are lying to me.

APPRENTICE
I don’t want to talk about it.

SIR
Why not?

APPRENTICE
It won’t change anything.

SIR
You found everyone he’d killed, Apprentice. All of them. Listed them there, in that album, and meant him to see that you knew. Went as far as to include it in your will.

[A MOMENT OF QUIET]

APPRENTICE
The coroner’s report on how he died was wrong, wasn’t it?

SIR
Yes. Yes it was. Like Elio knew it would be. He promised me that, or I’d… I’d have never…

APPRENTICE
Sir?

SIR
I’d have never let him go.

[WHOOSH]