The Golden Key

by Marian Womack

  He passed street lamp after street lamp, sometimes glimpsing a figure standing in the cones of light, and thought he saw him again, creeping amongst the shadows: the huge beggar that Charles had been scared of all those weeks back. But it probably wasn’t him; all those poor souls who descended upon the capital looked very much the same, Sam thought. The little lights from the lamps soon gave way to vast dark areas where street fires multiplied. These only illuminated a small circle around them, next to which sat the dark. They might give a little warmth to the men who stood next to them, but those fires didn’t give any protection against the shadows. London possessed its own darkness, a darkness it was impossible to pierce. Sam shivered as his motorcar advanced much too slowly through this forgotten landscape which pretended to be a city.

  Finally back home, a light supper awaited him on the stove, and some dry sherry had been decanted, which he drank avidly. He tried to read a little, but wasn’t in the mood.

  London was like a labyrinth, Sam thought, because it had been built by men with secrets, double lives, unspeakable desires. Sam, and others like him, would change all that, making sure the future was bright, void of duplicity. They would transform the world into a lighter place, crisp and clean. Those men were doing the opposite, refusing to give way, trying to cling to an outmoded way of life. He expected the twentieth century to dispel their long shadows once and for all, to be the century of Light.

  Bring back Victoria, or Albert? He couldn’t think of a more ghastly notion. They belonged to the past, and they had to remain there. Sam preferred to look into the future.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Downstairs, the sumptuous smells of a country breakfast awaited: sausages, pork pie, bread, ham, pickles. The Gibbet Inn had been built, as its name indicated, to host the crowds who came all the way to see the corpses of criminals, left to rot inside the iron cages at the crossroads just a bit further from the house.

  The journey into Norfolk had been tiring. Helena was trying to cover as much ground as possible before the visit to Lady Matthews’s estate later in the month. That part of the county had proved further away than she had expected, and she had been forced to stop for the night. It had been a sensible decision, both to allow herself some hours of much-needed rest, but also to think and process her findings before going back to town, where her other cases awaited.

  The previous night the landlady had shown her to her room, a little place with a window overlooking a never-ending field, a bed too big for the space available but with a pretty if faded eiderdown, an all-purpose table with its chair, and a washstand.

  Helena was still shaken by the experiences of the day. She wrote for a while, and eventually climbed into the bed to rest. But as soon as she was under the blankets, she found that she could not sleep, and kept turning right and left instead. She found herself thinking about the Tudor ruins, and the strange impression they had given her, a kind of morbid feeling, of darkness descending. She started shivering. Some instinct told her that the place possessed some hidden danger. The idea of the children playing there was ghastly; but children did play in ruins all the time.

  Where was this coming from? She was not a squeamish person, and she had seen her fair number of ruined places. But these ruins were different. It was as if some cloud had descended over the building, conquering it all; a nothingness that had swallowed it up, transporting it to a realm of sadness and decay.

  She tried to fix her mind on happier memories. Helena hadn’t been to Norfolk for a while, but she remembered how they used to come all the way up here sometimes, noisy groups of friends renting a pony and cart to go skating in the flooded fens, an occupation Girton girls were fond of whenever there had been a week-long frost. She was always amazed at the local boys, the way they gathered speed over those flat mirrors. The fenmen also came down to town in their skates sometimes, following the frozen river, their long hair reaching their shoulders. Once, a fenman was brought down to teach the girls from Newnham how to skate, and some of the Girton girls also went over. Suddenly, they found themselves surrounded by vicars, reverends, even a couple of bishops. She soon cleared the little mystery up; it was one of her first successes: it turned out that priests were the only men allowed to skate alongside the girls on that stretch of the river, and that the costume shop in Sidney Street had run out of religious attire that same week.

  Of course, she had seen them, all those same fields, covered by tons of water, ghostly and deadly. For the swollen floods carried with them anything they could find in their way: stems, timber, mud, small dead animals, cattle, the remains of lump thatched cottages. Men, women, children. When the snow flood came down the river, it overflowed a little, its brownish waters lurking like marshland mist. The breaking of the ice was much more terrible. For the men, used to those great frozen expanses, could cover so many miles skating much faster than they could keep an eye on them.

  She remembered that early case well, the missing child— how could she ever forget it?—and how the father had tried to make them all believe that the little one had been drowned in this manner. The village where it happened had been close to Huntingdon, just where the Ouse turns abruptly eastwards, and the father had no doubt got inspiration for his long tale out of the local ghost story. The ghost in question was that of a soldier stationed in Huntingdon in Napoleonic times, who fell in love with a girl who lived upstream. He went to visit her, skating over the river, as that year the frosts stayed longer. When the temperature rose he didn’t notice. It was still bitterly cold. He was close to her house when the ice cracked and he fell into the water. It was said you could still see him sometimes, recognisable by his old-fashioned cassock, speeding over the river.

  Soon after leaving Cambridge, the world had become open fields of tired green, and farming lands of darker soil, traversed by oily ditches. A solitary church, shooting up; a long dyke; fields of wheat, potato fields, busy in planting season. A plough led by a pair of horses in the distance, almost at the edge of her vision, a man labouring with difficulty behind it.

  An artificial landscape this was, with its unmoving rivers, all those silent masses of water, like quiet pools covering dark secrets. She was always surprised that the coachmen knew the direction to take. For it all looked the same to her, north, south, east, west, with the horizon so flat, so deceptively clear. Even on light days the Fens never ceased to be a landscape of uncertainties. Would it be possible to get lost here? The answer was yes. For three bodies never to be recovered—that was certainly a much harder proposition.

  As they left Cambridgeshire behind, the mist of the early morning rose above the ankle, much higher, and the spires of the churches started to appear and disappear as if in a dream, looking as ethereal as if they were made of the mist itself. She was heading towards the east coast, to a part of the county put together by villages founded in Saxon or Danish times, a heavily invaded part of the world, and therefore wary of strangers. That part of the county also prided themselves on their punts, and there was still duck, goose and plover catching. One of the pictures Lady Matthews had passed to her in London showed one of those primitive vessels.

  The previous days it had taken her only a few hours to reach that haunted realm: the man-made inland lakes of the Broads, surrounded by reeds and thin lines of trees; the tall, elegant church towers, ruins at the mercy of the tides and the advancing seas, so many of them finally claimed, with so many ghostly bells that chimed because they had forgotten they did not exist any longer. There, the thatched roofs of the huts changed from the saw sedge to the common Norfolk reed, with its final ornamentation a pattern indicating the particular thatcher who had employed his artisanship. She had never seen that done anywhere but here.

  Further away, she knew, the edge of the sea was hardly an edge, as both land and water refused to give way to one another. It was a space unsure of itself, a mixture of marshes and mudflats, and a capricious tideline. This was where it all started, where the three little girls had vanished, and Samuel
Moncrieff had appeared. This was where she was heading.

  * * *

  Helena had found the little copse of ash trees, not much bigger than a miniature forest where children might play hide-and-seek and find each other after two seconds. She had been told that behind it was the meadow where the Tudor ruins stood; it had been clearly pointed out to her from a distance; the driver would not go anywhere near it.

  She was sure that anyone, even the least perceptive person, would have noticed the light. Before she entered the copse it had possessed its normal fluidity. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant or sunny day, but perfectly adequate for an afternoon stroll, with a breeze that now and then brought traces of sea air. The birds were chirping, and the copse was alive with that vibrating soul of the countryside, clearly present although discreetly and unobtrusively, the way nature tends to be. There but not there.

  And then she came to the other end of the copse and out into the meadow.

  Before she did so, Helena noticed something odd: the ash-like substance. It was similar to the black sticky residue that floats in the air after a fire; but it was pallid, white, and she had no idea where it came from, how to account for it. She noticed it gradually, and when she came out the other end she realised that the whole meadow was covered in it; though, to tell the truth, it was not exactly covered, for the way it floated around her made her think for a moment that she had stepped into a snow bubble.

  Helena asked herself a simple question: was it possible to be scared of light?

  For the light had changed its quality somehow; it had become denser, less fluid, more leaden with white, less transparent. The best comparison she could think of was doing a watercolour sketch, that moment when the sky is worked and, by mistake, you dip your brush in the white paint and add it to the light and fluid water-and-blue mixture. It suddenly acquires density, weight, becomes opaque. Later on, when the moment came to put all of it in writing, that was how she came to explain it. Imagine, she would write, that happening to light. Imbued in this odd substance, bathed by a wrong kind of light, the meadow felt a little claustrophobic, for lack of a better word.

  And now, the ruins.

  It was a Tudor manor, or what remained of it, built and abandoned a long time ago. It had all happened many years before, all that history which could be read in those remaining walls: the rapid ascent of the family fortunes, the impressive building in the Norfolk countryside. The rise and fall of everything, the lost luck. And afterwards, last of all, the fire: licking those walls, eating up the tapestries, blackening the Great Hall forever. She could imagine it all. As well as the collapsed ceiling, most of the eastern wing was gone. She slowly made her way into the ruin.

  Despite the blackened walls in the Great Hall she could inspect the carvings. Three sirens, one playing the flute, one playing the lute, the third one holding something in her hands, a rock, perhaps. It was an odd image to have put in there. In the old days people preferred to decorate their lavish rooms with scenes from the Bible, in this part of the country perhaps with some discreet Marian concession. But there they were anyway, three sirens, presumably beckoning men to die in the dark embrace of the North Sea.

  Most of the structure remained, but the ceiling was mostly gone. Instead, the visitor got a canopy of overgrown tree branches, and the leaden sky of the region. Dirt and stones covered the floor, and the remaining walls and panels, even the odd remaining door, were incredibly mouldy. Helena put her hand to one, and she found it warm and soft to the touch; it felt to her like a living thing, for it seemed that it was probably always warm, as if time had somehow stopped here. Perhaps the floating white-like ash substance was designed to do exactly that: stop time, condense it. As if time itself had infused the fungi with an energy that the prodigious decay could not abate.

  But it was in no way a positive energy; it was negative, dark, wicked.

  She noticed the silence, for no bird could be heard. And where had the breeze gone that should have moved the canopy above her head? The branches she saw, forming a substitute, withering ceiling, were oddly still. And yet she knew that, were she to come out the other side of the copse and move away from the house, she would feel the wind again, freshening up her face.

  Helena thought she had seen jackdaws as well—why were they so silent? Why were they acting as if they were mere shadows of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the copse? Were they shadows of their brothers and sisters?

  The only audible sound was a faint murmur of water, waves splashing and breaking in foaming splendour. Where did it come from? Completely disorientated for a second, something that didn’t happen to her often, she could not figure out which direction the sea was, or how far away. She had thought that she had come farther from it, not closer, when leaving the village. To say that she was confused would be to understate the obvious: Helena knew where she was; but then, she was lost also. Or rather she felt lost.

  As soon as she realised this, a sense of dread took hold of her, as if her being lost were not a temporary state, but one that threatened to carry on forever.

  Then she thought of them, those three little girls, lost the same year that Samuel Moncrieff had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. And she tried to imagine them in that horrid place, in those ruins where, according to the records, they had been so fond of playing.

  * * *

  The story ran as follows: In 1881 the three Matthews sisters, Maud, Alice and Flora, mysteriously vanished during a hunting weekend at their father’s newly built manor house in east Norfolk. The search that followed the disappearance centred on this new building, with its peculiarities of construction (the eccentric architect had later jumped from a tower), and also took in the members of the hunting party, the Broads’ quicksands and marshy beaches. Downham Market Horse Fair had just taken place—true, it was on the other side of the county, but nonetheless it had brought in gypsies from all over the land, crisscrossing the Fens, raising fears that the girls had been kidnapped.

  Helena had flinched when she had read this, wondered what her great-grandmother, a proud and beautiful Andalusian Roma who married an aristocratic landowner, would have made of reading something so daringly expressed by a reckless newspaper.

  Whatever had happened to Maud, Alice and Flora, the truth of the matter was that nothing was ever found. The girls were never seen again. Lord Matthews died shortly after. Their stepmother, the new Lady Matthews, became a recluse. A distant cousin from an impoverished line of the family, much younger than Lord Matthews, and going from being the children’s governess to being their stepmother, some malicious minds had seen foul play at work, and she had been a suspect for some time. In the end they could not charge her with anything, so the matter was dropped. But it did not surprise Helena to find out that her line of the family, although as poor as a church mouse, in fact used to own the estate before losing it to an entail.

  That was the tale.

  Once upon a time, three little girls, gone.

  Helena always did this before taking on any case: making sure that everything matched the version of events that she had been given, not taking any story at face value. Putting the story together took her the best part of a morning in the Round Reading Room, working piecemeal from twenty-year-old tomes of bound county newspapers, a copy of Debrett’s, Lord Matthews’s obituary in The Times, and a couple of the county parish gazettes. Accessing Scotland Yard’s records office had been harder to achieve, but eventually she had got there as well. According to the official investigation, Lady Matthews had been romantically involved with one of Sir Malcolm’s friends. None other than the architect of the new abbey.

  The tale Helena had put together had left her strangely unhappy. It had the odd flavour of a story already known, the feeling of a nightmarish fairy tale she had heard long back. Something told her that there would be no happy ending here.

  In a few weeks, Lady Matthews and her companion, Mrs Ashby, would open their house to some practitioners of the Spiritualis
t religion in order to conduct a number of séances. And, before that, some meetings would take place in London, where mediums, clairvoyants, the Matthews family and their friends, would get together in the pursuit of the truth.

  During her brief encounter with Lady Matthews in Charles Bale’s house, Helena had made sure that the old lady understood everything about her, and which kind of answers she would bring to the table.

  ‘May I ask a question, Miss Walton? How did you come to do what you do?’ the old lady had asked.

  ‘A child disappeared.’

  Lady Matthews frowned.

  ‘May I ask what happened, exactly?’

  ‘A child lost in the Fens.’

  ‘I see; that disorientating, flat place. Easier to get lost there than in the labyrinth of this wretched city, I’m sure.’

  ‘Then I’m sure that you understand exactly what the problem was, Lady Matthews. But he hadn’t just got lost, mind you. I can assure you the fairies didn’t spirit him away.’

  The older woman did not reply, although she sat upright with a jolt. ‘I have to be honest: the reason why I found him before the police did utterly escapes me,’ Helena continued. ‘His father’s rage was all too obvious, as was the jealousy with which the man hovered around his wife, as were the little, mean, creative ways in which he punished her. To me, it was painfully obvious that he would use the most defenceless creature to get back at her.’

  ‘Did you find the boy? Was he alive?’

  ‘Yes, I found the child alive. Quite nearby, in fact, on the outskirts of Newmarket, hidden in a derelict hut where horses had been stabled, badly. That little building had seen a lot of suffering.’

  ‘And the mediumship?’

  She looked at Lady Matthews intently. She did not usually share this kind of information with her clients. But something told her that Lady Matthews was not just any client, and that she would not be placated by a rebuff. Eventually, she said: