The Golden Key

by Marian Womack

  Eliza thought it remarkable, the similarities with the girl she had found in the marshes.

  As she couldn’t get any reaction from the young woman, Eliza decided to inspect the room. In a corner there was a little shelf. Nothing amiss, nothing unwholesome. The fresh flowers in vases on her dresser, books, drawings of flowery and furry things pinned to the walls, an expensive tortoiseshell set of brushes and combs, and a dusty pile of large sketch notebooks lying on a chest.

  The drawings in the sketchbooks. They were old and yellowish and she immediately saw why: one had the inscription ‘Maud Matthews, 1878’. Eliza started passing the pages slowly, finding it difficult to describe what she was seeing, and wondered what uncanny spirit could have taken hold of a little girl’s imagination to invent the scenes depicted in the ordered, cream-coloured paper.

  They mostly showed the ruin of some kind of city, with twisted spires, turrets and domes, all placed under an ominous moon and covered in a dark mist. A mighty citadel of standing stones surrounded the buildings, as if they were soldiers protecting them with their long shadows. The fantastic edifices, the pillars, the gargoyle tops, all spoke of wrong angles, twisted symmetries, uncanny architectural rules; as if a set of demons had been entrusted with the compass, the square, and the building materials.

  ‘She adores those drawings. Lord Matthews made sure his daughters learnt how to draw properly; he thought it the mark of a lady. She seems to be very fond of those.’ Eliza looked up and saw an elderly woman with a face that was furrowed and worried.

  ‘But you should not be here. I would have liked to show you tomorrow morning. She gets very excitable at this time of the night.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought Mrs Ashby’s letter said to come tonight. To tell you the truth, I could hear her crying all the way from the main road.’

  ‘Well, then I haven’t been doing my job properly,’ the woman simply said, and walked towards the mirror. ‘Come along, Dot. Let’s go to bed.’

  She tried to cajole the young woman to get up, and they had a little scuffle. Eliza moved to help her, but the woman indicated that she didn’t need her assistance.

  Eventually, Dot got up docilely and, like a doll, let herself be guided to bed.

  ‘I am Mrs Burroughs.’

  ‘Miss Eliza Waltraud,’ she said, extending her own hand, and they greeted one another properly. Despite the late hour, Mrs Burroughs was dressed in the usual attire of a governess rather than a nightgown: her duties must be plentiful, Eliza thought.

  Once in bed, Dot started whining again.

  ‘Reading to her always has a sobering effect,’ Mrs Burroughs said. Trying to make herself useful, and being closer than her, Eliza turned in the direction of the little shelf, and took down a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which she brought over to the bed.

  ‘Will this do?’ she asked. From the bed, Dot caught a glimpse of the book cover, and her eyes went wide and manic, and she crunched herself against the wall, trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and the book. Her eyes were shouting; a silent, contained interior cry that chilled Eliza’s soul.

  ‘Whatever is the matter?’ she asked, as Mrs Burroughs deftly took the book from her hand and, from the threshold, threw it into the other room.

  ‘She doesn’t like the surreal musings of Reverend Dodgson,’ she offered, moving to the wardrobe.

  ‘I can quite see that,’ Eliza replied.

  Mrs Burroughs took a key from her pocket, unlocked the furniture piece, and opened it to reveal some clothes hanging and, on the shelves, a collection of little bottles and jars, a convalescent’s expected assortment of medicines. She started mixing a drop of something in water.

  ‘Miss Waltraud.’

  ‘Eliza, please.’

  ‘I must ask one favour from you,’ she said, while she moved to the bed, and deftly made Dot swallow whatever she had concocted, which had a sobering and soporific effect.

  ‘What is it?’

  She looked directly at Eliza’s eyes.

  ‘To remain discreet about Dot at all times.’

  ‘Mrs Burroughs, you can rest assured of my discretion. I have been hired to help by Mrs Ashby, and I do not make a habit of exposing my employer’s secrets to anyone.’ Eliza could detect a sigh of relief. ‘Nonetheless, may I ask who Dot is, how she came to be here?’

  ‘Oh, she’s Dorothea Jenkins, the butler’s daughter.’

  ‘Was she born—?’

  ‘Idiotic? I don’t like that word very much. But no, not in the least. She was a very promising student, or so I’m told.’ The sadness in her voice made Eliza realise how fond she was of her charge.

  ‘Has any doctor seen her?’ was her next question.

  Mrs Burroughs laughed.

  ‘Many doctors have been to see her these past twenty years…’ She didn’t see the need to finish the sentence. Her silence stated the obvious.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Nobody knows. She was good friends with the missing children, used to play with them sometimes; mind you, only when she could. Even a schooled butler’s daughter sometimes has duties to perform in a big house like this.’

  ‘The children? Do you mean the three little girls?’ Eliza had heard the story many years ago, when she was a little child. The woman’s age seemed right. Mrs Burroughs’s words sent a shiver up her spine. ‘Are you saying she was present the day the children disappeared?’

  For the second time, Mrs Burroughs turned to look directly into Eliza’s eyes. She stopped rearranging the books, drawings and the little objects on the shelf.

  ‘She was found like this the day the girls disappeared, Miss Waltraud.’

  Eliza could not help noticing that Mrs Burroughs’s eyes kept firmly concentrating on every single book and object available to her busy hands, but that she deliberately didn’t look at the drawings, almost as if she didn’t see them; or, rather, as if she didn’t want to look in their direction.

  * * *

  The next morning Mrs Burroughs took Eliza to Dot’s daytime retreat. They met at the bottom of the winter garden, and from there they took a little path she indicated, a shortcut of sorts. At some point she stopped, turned round to look at the back of the weird house, pale as a ghost, and beckoned Eliza to do the same.

  ‘Do you see that window, the second one on the right-hand side, top floor? That’s where the architect jumped from.’ She smiled a knowing smile.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Eliza thought.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Burroughs, you’ve lost me.’

  And so the older woman explained: the famous architect who had built the abbey had committed suicide shortly afterwards, while staying as a house guest.

  ‘May I ask,’ Eliza started, ‘why is Dot scared of Alice in Wonderland?’

  Mrs Burroughs shrugged.

  ‘No idea. It seems it was one of the Matthews girls’ favourite books. No one has told me that, but everything Dot uses comes from the girls’ things, and you could not find another book more dog-eared.’

  Eliza did not reply.

  ‘Do you want to know something else?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘It was the nursery window,’ insisted the old woman, intent on keeping conversation within certain subjects.

  They resumed walking and, by a low vine-covered wall, Mrs Burroughs vanished. Eliza followed: among the greenery a space was revealed, only visible when you approached it from a certain angle. A hidden yellow path. It led towards a further garden, a back kitchen garden much neglected. At the end sat a dilapidated glasshouse, with a half-ruined pavilion in the French style. Once they got closer Eliza realised that it was an orangery. She could see there was someone inside.

  ‘Is that—?’

  ‘Yes. It calms her a lot to work with her flowers.’

  A light drizzle started to drip from the sky. They reached the orangery, overrun by plants, pots with seeds in different stages of growth; at the back, test tubes and glass
jars on a wooden table: the tools of an amateur botanist. Small bouquets hung upside down from the walls. It took Eliza a few seconds to notice that all the plants were sempervivums, or immortalis, which she had seen distributed all over the cottage in vases, chipped china cups filled with petals, covering dressers and tables and every possible surface. And this was presumably where they came from.

  The butler’s daughter sat by a discarded old-fashioned oak desk covered in worn-out leather. Dot was cutting the dainty petals, purple and white and yellow, into a kind of potpourri that she collected on used scraps of paper scattered here and there, some intention dictating her methodical procedure. She seemed to be making pouches with them. Eliza took one sempervivum by its stem and rolled it between her fingers; it pricked her. She had thought them fresh; they were dry, utterly rigid. The rain fell softly over the glass structure, slowly ticking.

  ‘Dot,’ Eliza said, ‘I’m glad to see you are feeling better this morning.’

  Everything was odd about that moment. It felt as if she was speaking with a ghost, but there she was, distant and indifferent and alive, entirely unaware of her presence.

  ‘Mrs Burroughs, excuse my bluntness, but why was Dot not sent away, put in an institution?’ Eliza asked. The governess replied that she didn’t know, but Eliza had the impression that she understood the reason: Lady Matthews. Whatever had happened to the child, Lady Matthews felt guilty about it.

  ‘Dot, do you remember your friends, Alice, Maud and Flora?’ asked Eliza.

  Mrs Burroughs shook her head softly.

  ‘She has been questioned many times, and has never spoken.’

  Dot started violently shaking the flowers, and crushing them on the table.

  ‘That’s it, calm down!’ Mrs Burroughs tried to hold her arms before she could hurt herself, and shouted in Eliza’s direction: ‘There! That green vial!’

  She handed it over, and Mrs Burroughs deftly made her drink a couple of drops, which instantly calmed her.

  ‘That’s the most reaction anyone has got from her this past decade!’ She tried to smile, but Eliza was feeling unnerved by the proceedings: she liked Mrs Burroughs, and no doubt her task of looking after the young woman was daunting, but she had misgivings about the idea of keeping her drugged as the only means to manage her.

  ‘What’s in the vial?’

  ‘A herbal mixture with laudanum. I will teach you to prepare it.’

  Eliza dropped the bud she had been handling on the desk, now crushed, amongst the disorder of scissors, canisters, bits of rope and dirty mugs. Calm, unmoving, and suddenly pale after her brief moment of passion, Dot reminded Eliza of a living corpse. She shuddered. Eventually she got up from the table covered in papers, fountain pens and little pots with crimson liquid inside, all needed for whatever Dot was doing with those flowers, and she left. She crossed the overgrown kitchen garden without once turning to look at the crumbling building. It was better that way, in case she caught sight of a ghost smiling at her from one of the broken windows. You never knew where they lurked at that deceptive daytime hour.

  * * *

  Once Mrs Hobbs had exhausted her local wisdom—all the black horses, Old Shucks, Tiddy Muns, and giants that roamed the Broads, which did not really amount to much, to tell the truth—she had suggested visiting Old John. Eliza had found a labourer happy to take her there on his pony and cart.

  It was far away, on the other side of Lady Matthews’s estate. He had dropped her at the edge of a field she happened to know from her wanderings; had she really been so far out? He explained he would go and visit a friend, and told her how to get to Old John’s house. He set off, and soon was a black dot in the distance.

  The field extended evenly into a distant horizon. From what she knew, there should be a meadow at one end, Lady Matthews’s estate on the other, a brief copse, not consequent enough to be considered a forest, mud, some cows, old wooden fences to keep the cattle, kissing gates to climb over. What she couldn’t see was the end of the field, or her way out of it, nor could she hear the nearby sea.

  She looked for the sun to orient herself, and then she noticed that the light had changed all of a sudden, that the very air seemed to be gathering darkness around itself. All was tainted a dull colour, opaque and unwelcoming. She found herself in a meadow. Ahead, the little house, with animals running around, clothes hanging in the breeze, and children playing, running, singing.

  Give a thing, take a thing, to wear the Devil’s old ring.

  She started advancing in its direction; she felt tired. Then she saw him, an old man resting against a tree. In the distance the poplars of the uncanny meadow were oddly still. Old John.

  ‘Hello there?’

  He didn’t turn. He didn’t stir.

  ‘Hello, I’m Eliza Waltraud. I have come to see you.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘I wrote you a letter, and your daughter replied that I should come today.’

  Nothing.

  And then she felt it: a contraction in her stomach that told her that she was looking at someone dead.

  Slowly, she started going round the tree to face the old man. His mouth and his jaw were strangely greenish and mouldy, as if someone had poured an acidic substance over his lower face. His tongue was green and swollen.

  In the cottage, the old man’s family were occupying themselves with their many daily chores. One of the children saw her there, and started advancing in her direction, and by some instinct must have reacted to Eliza’s expression, for the child stopped, turned round and ran towards the house. Shortly after she reached the house a woman came out running.

  ‘They must not see him!’ Eliza shouted. There was no panic, no intimation of fear in her countenance. The woman heard what she had said, and calmly instructed the older children to take the little ones back inside. She knew instantly, of course; but Eliza looked back into the distant meadow, over which no birds passed at that moment, so oddly silent, and she understood: these people had lived so long under the powerful thrall of superstition, their existences shaped and reshaped by the inexplicable, that they accepted everything that happened to them.

  She needn’t have been so worried about what they might see, for when she looked back at the body the face was back to normal. That unexpected metamorphosis into the mundane scared her far more than the face’s previous grotesque state.

  What on earth was going on?

  * * *

  She woke up, to find that her driver had taken her back home.

  ‘My dear, are you alright? You gave us quite a fright!’ Mrs Hobbs was fussing over her.

  Eliza felt clammy, out of breath. She had no recollection of getting back into the cart, but eventually she must have found her way back, climbed on it, and let herself be taken back home. She didn’t want to be seen like that.

  ‘Mrs Hobbs, have you called my cousin?’

  ‘Not yet. Mr Hobbs is about to go to…’

  ‘Please don’t. I am feeling much better now.’

  Perhaps it was overwork—she was doing too much.

  She was writing her monograph on Eunice, intent on lifting the curse of her vanishing; she was taking her regular stroll before breakfast, looking for birds that ought to be there and weren’t; she spent hours making copious notes of everything remarkable, beautiful, or simply mundane; she helped with Dot a few days a week; she was also now trying to keep a record of where she spotted the unnatural—no better word than that—greenish hue bursting over the waters some mornings from Wicken Far End, in what seemed to be a triangle formed by the ruined church, the old factory, and the Tudor ruins; and finally, she had at last decided to merge her two notebooks into one another, feeling that the scientific and the preternatural were screaming at her that a dialogue was required at once between the one and the other.

  And, to top it all, she was trying very hard indeed to ignore her persistent dead mother.

  Too much, that was obvious.

  Were Eliza to consult a physician, or
physicians, she knew that they would run some tests, take a blood sample. She believed in medicine, hygiene, more than she did in otherworldly manifestations. Or so she kept repeating to herself.

  But still, she had to admit it: her belief in science could be misplaced after all. For she would only be told the same thing as always: eat more meat and drink more red wine. Take country walks, have a little holiday. That was if she found a modern physician. Unmoving quietness, not getting over-excited, not leaving the house, quit reading at once, and what about all that manic writing! That was the most probable prescription for a woman, no matter what ailment she had. Even, she feared, from kind Peter. Old habits die hard… Whatever little scientific knowledge remained in her stupid brain sufficed for her to acknowledge that, at least, she was suffering what seemed to be a strong headache.

  There was no denying it. She had seen it, next to the body, as she had seen it in the wretched place. Another tern, dead on the floor.

  ‘Fairy grave,’ her driver had enunciated, after they had reached the boundary of Lady Matthews’s land, and were getting closer to Old John’s house. It was a curious name, but Eliza knew that ‘grave’ in Norfolk simply meant a hole in the ground. There was, of course, no hole, and no fairy. Or so she had thought until now.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The afternoon passed slowly enough. Sam went for a drive in his car, and eventually drove it back home. He had been looking for something, or someone, but it was only an odd feeling; if he had been asked he would not have known what. He didn’t see Charles, who was attending a committee meeting of the League, and occupied his time alone by writing in his journal, something that he had not done since before the river accident. He read a little of George MacDonald’s book. He had learnt that Viola’s favourite author was still alive, a very old man living in Surrey, and was trying to decide whether a visit to the writer would be at all possible. He had no idea what he expected to achieve from it: it would not bring Viola back. Nothing would.