House of Secrets

by Lynda Stacey

  There was another crash of thunder, making her jump up and she carefully made her way back to where Bandit stood.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ he shouted above the noise of the storm and picked up the wheelbarrow handles, quickly running out of the greenhouse and towards a door.

  ‘Where to? The house?’

  ‘No. Let’s shelter in here for a while, it’s closer and that storm’s coming in worse.’

  Bandit opened a door that was buried in the wall behind the greenhouse and pushed Madeleine inside. ‘Wait here. I’m going to get rid of the glass.’

  Madeleine immediately fumbled with the torch and shone it in through the door. The shelter was a brick room, around fifteen feet square with what looked like an old steam train engine standing in the corner, with a bench to its side. It was surprisingly clean and polished and looked as though it had recently been lit.

  ‘What is this place?’ she asked as Bandit returned.

  ‘It’s the old boiler room. The engine is a heater for the greenhouse. The original owner used to grow grapes and the boiler kept the grapes warm. He was a part of the rail industry, which meant that he had access to steam trains.’ He pointed to the engine. ‘I know it’s not, but it looks like new. I bet we could get it going if I had some dry wood.’

  Madeleine flashed her torch around the shelter. No wood jumped out but the intense and direct light of her torch did catch sight of something under the engine. ‘What’s that?’

  She pointed the torch at what she’d seen and Bandit got down on all fours and then onto his side to look underneath.

  ‘I’m not sure. It looks like a metal box,’ he answered. ‘It must have been under there for years. It looks as though it’s purposely been pushed underneath. I’m surprised it’s not scorched.’

  ‘Can you pull it out?’ Madeleine asked eagerly as she watched Bandit struggle to move the box. He looked around for a tool and used an old metal bar to manoeuvre the box out.

  ‘It’s probably just full of seeds,’ he said as he placed it on the floor before her.

  ‘Can you open it?’ Madeleine whispered.

  He opened the lid easily and then pulled away tissue paper that lay within to reveal a small book. Madeleine held the torch closer and noticed the words ‘Emily Ennis’ clearly written on the front.

  ‘Oh, my word,’ she whispered as she carefully lifted the perfectly intact book from out of the metal tin.

  ‘I think you’ve just found one of Emily Ennis’s diaries,’ Bandit said as his fingers carefully turned the paper-thin page to reveal a beautiful script-like handwriting. ‘Here, take a look.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  January 18th, 1942

  The house is cold and the weather here in Yorkshire is relentless. The snow is falling and Father has finally agreed to light the huge fire in the parlour, but we need other ways of keeping warm and walk around the house wearing several layers of clothing.

  Mary and I both cuddle up in our rooms and sleep together most of the time. It’s much warmer this way and even though our mother often tells us that at eighteen we are much too old to sleep together, we treat it like a game and wait until she’s asleep before sneaking from one room to the other. One night is spent in my room, the next in Mary’s. We’ve tried to explain the twin thing, but no one understands it but us. Besides, we like to chat to one another and make up ghost stories, just as soon as the lights go out.

  I’m worried about Jimmy; he’s sixteen now and seems to have reached an age where he’s taking an unhealthy interest in the chambermaids. Our father has been heard reprimanding him so many times. But then, I’m not sure that it’s all Jimmy’s fault. I’ve seen how the maids linger in the family rooms whenever he is home, especially Molly. Her family are quite poor and live in the village, whereas Jimmy is a young man with quite an inheritance who would be quite a coup for Molly to entrap, especially seeing as he is so young and so easily swayed. Molly seems quite the temptress and just a little too bold and forthright for her own good. I’ve tried to warn him of the dangers, that the gold-diggers are out there, but he’s young and bored and I doubt that he cares, so long as he’s getting what he wants. After all, he is a man. I worry where it will all end and some days I pray for the holidays to be over and for Father to send him back to school.

  Mary has taken a liking to Benjamin, the new valet. He’s much older than her, but rather handsome. He does smile at her sweetly and she seems to enjoy his attentions. I saw her with him in the garden today. He lifted his hand and stroked her cheek and I’m sure that they’re in love, but as yet she still hasn’t said.

  It’s now late, yet still Mary hasn’t come to my room as we’d planned earlier today, so I fear she’s gone to meet him after dark, which upsets me a little. But, if she has gone to meet him, I hope that she is being sensible and isn’t taking any risks. Our mother would internally combust if Mary ever announced that she were pregnant.

  I walked past Eddie today. My whole heart lifted when he whistled at me and winked. It was his normal sign to meet him at teatime, and even though I know that I shouldn’t and that I worry about the others being involved with the staff, Eddie is different and I go to meet him whenever I can, without Father’s permission. There would be no point in even trying to get Father to allow it. I’ve never met anyone quite as mean and I just know that he would never understand that two people from such different backgrounds could actually be friends and if he found out he’d probably go mad.

  Eddie and I meet on the staircase, the one that’s hidden within the house and leads to a single room beneath the bell tower. Not even the servants know that it’s there. Only the immediate family know how to find it and I’ve taken a risk showing Eddie. It was the only place I could think of where we could meet undisturbed and where Father wouldn’t stumble upon us during his evening walk around the house.

  I let Eddie in and we both went one by one up the staircase and, after letting ourselves through the panel, we sat on the wooden steps and held hands for at least an hour. We spoke to each other non-stop, until the hourly chiming of the bell tower indicated that it was time for tea. It also got so loud that we ended up running down the stairs laughing, with our hands over our ears, and had to hold our breath at the bottom so that no one heard us giggle. I know it’s wrong for us to act like this and if we were found out it would bring disgrace upon me and upon my family, but I wonder if it would be so wrong to take Eddie up to the room beyond the staircase. It’d be much warmer than sitting on the steps, but there’s a bed up there and that’s what makes me nervous. I’m a little worried that he’d get the wrong idea, even though I doubt that he’d ever take advantage, but I’d be terrified that our being up there in the first place would be seen as an invitation.

  Father expects me to marry well. He expects me to marry a solicitor or a doctor or someone of consequence and within the year will be introducing me to every eligible bachelor that he can think of. They’ll be invited to dinner at first and if we get along, there would be a reason why he and his parents would come to stay at the house and pretend to be fascinated in what I do. Of course, I’ll do my best to be boring and feign an interest in needlepoint, knitting or reading. I wouldn’t talk much and I may even pretend to be sick or not to like boys at all. One by one, I expect they’ll ask me to marry them. Their parents would expect them to ask, whether they like me or not, and would probably be sat with Father in the library waiting for news.

  The thought of being paraded before so many men terrifies me to the core and, if I’m honest, I feel as though I’m trapped in Victorian England, not in 1942. Our whole family acts with such propriety, but then again Father is an important man and I dare not argue. Father wouldn’t expect me to question him. Instead, one by one, I’ll just have to refuse and find some petty reason for doing so.

  However, with Mary and I being twins, it will be a race to see which one of us they can marry off first. I’m sure we’ll both be expected to marry before we’re t
wenty-one, just like our mother did and though I’m sure that Mother loves our father now, the last thing I want is a marriage with no room for sentiment. I just hope and pray that the times change and, if nothing else, I would rather be single than marry someone I don’t love.

  I’m sure Eddie would ask me to marry him if he thought that Father would allow it, but he knows not to ask for fear of losing his job. The gatehouse, in which Eddie and his mother live, is tied to the hall and if Eddie didn’t work here, he and his mother might lose their home, which means that we wouldn’t get to see one another at all.

  Madeleine’s fingers turned the wafer thin pages of the diary as she sat shivering beside Bandit. They looked at each other in amazement as the diary began to reveal its secrets.

  ‘I can’t believe she talks like this in 1942. She sounds as though she were born in eighteen hundred and something,’ Bandit said as Madeleine turned to the next page. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Madeleine shook her head. ‘I think it’s really sad. It must have been awful for her to know that her parents were going to introduce her to all of those men and, what’s more, she’d be expected to marry one of them. I mean, what if she didn’t like them? She loved Eddie.’ Madeleine pouted and flicked over the page, hoping to read some more words that Emily had written, but the words had stopped and in their place were the most beautiful pencil drawings she’d ever seen.

  ‘Wow, Emily must have been quite an accomplished artist, look at these,’ she said as the five or six very small pictures came to life before them. Each picture sat alone with a smudged blend of pencil between each to bring them together on the page.

  But, it was the drawing central to the page that caught Madeleine’s eye. It was of a man dressed in old, torn clothing. His trousers were far too short for his legs, yet he wore a shirt and a waistcoat. He was leaning on a spade that was propped up firmly in the ground, as though taking a break from doing the gardening. His right hand was just about to touch his cap, making Madeleine think that maybe he was about to take it off. It was a natural pose, his eyes looked kind and he smiled towards the place where Emily must have sat drawing him. Maybe she’d asked him to pose that way, or maybe she’d caught an image of Eddie in her memory, a snapshot of his day as he’d stood there working her father’s land.

  ‘Do you think that’s Eddie?’ Madeleine looked up and into Bandit’s face, which in the lamplight had softened and she noticed how he gazed in a dream-like fashion at the picture.

  Bandit shook his head. ‘Who knows.’

  Madeleine held the torch up and slightly away from the picture. It looked ghostlike in the shadows and even though the man was smiling, he looked sad.

  ‘At least people are allowed to love who they like nowadays,’ Maddie whispered as her finger lightly brushed the image.

  Of all the marriages she knew, and of all her married friends, not one of them would have followed the rules of times gone by. Most wouldn’t have even been allowed to marry in those days. Yet here they were not so many years later and most were happy, most were completely untraditional and Madeleine couldn’t help but think that she was pleased that times had changed.

  She stared at the picture and then back at Bandit. There was a resemblance there and it occurred to her that, if it hadn’t been drawn over seventy years ago, it could almost have been a picture of him; the eyes were the same shape, the mouth tipped up at one corner in a similar way and the jawline was square and symmetrical. She shook her head and smiled to herself. She hadn’t realised until now that she’d taken quite so much notice of Bandit’s appearance.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Madeleine was still damp from the rain and now shivered with the cold after sitting outside in the boiler room for over two hours. She and Bandit had read the first few pages of the diary with interest, looked at the pictures and had talked about how life must have been for Emily and it was only when the torchlight had begun to flicker that they’d closed the pages and made their way back to the house.

  She walked through the office and climbed up the back staircase to her bedroom. But as soon as she entered her room she knew that something was different. There was a smell that she couldn’t place, a perfume or aftershave, and as she looked around she noticed that the huge pink teddy bear that her father had given Poppy was sitting in the middle of her four-poster bed. She immediately went to check on Poppy through the open bedroom door but then stopped in her tracks, as she distinctly remembered closing Poppy’s door before going out to help Bandit. So why was it now open? A look into Poppy’s room showed her that her daughter was still fast asleep, tucked up in the middle of her teddy bear mountain and looked as though she hadn’t moved. So, who had opened the door and how had the bear got on to her bed?

  Madeleine moved to the bed and picked up the bear. It had a blindfold over its eyes made from Madeleine’s favourite long satin nightdress. A perfect bow was tied and the bear had been balanced carefully in position. She looked towards the room where her daughter slept. Could Poppy have tied such a perfect bow? Madeleine shook her head, it couldn’t be Poppy, could it? She couldn’t even tie a knot. But if it hadn’t been Poppy, then who?

  Tired and disturbed by the night’s events, Maddie placed the teddy bear back in Poppy’s room and double checked the locks on the door, vowing that in the future, she’d ensure it was locked at all times.

  Morris Pocklington poured a glass of whisky, then walked into the lounge and sat down in the blue winged captain’s chair, toasting his feet before the wood burning fire and staring into its depths.

  ‘Never waste a log, Jack,’ he said as Jack walked out of the bar and through the grand hall towards the kitchen.

  ‘I agree, Mr Pocklington. It would be a shame to do so, wouldn’t it? Can I get you anything, sir?’ Jack asked in his normal polite manner.

  Morris nodded. ‘Another whisky, if you will. It’s been quite a night.’ He finished the dregs of the whisky already in his glass and passed it to Jack.

  Jack had worked at the hall almost since the first day that Morris had bought it. He was young, still in his twenties, but had a head on his shoulders of someone much older and so much more mature. Morris liked him and quite early on, due to his hard work and enthusiasm, he’d been earmarked for promotion. When Josie had died, Morris had offered him the post of junior manager, a position he’d been proud to accept and thrived upon. He was the perfect host, good at his job and, more often than not, worked extra hours, going far beyond his duties to ensure that the running of Wrea Head was done to the best of his ability. What’s more, he often sat with Morris on a night when the older man felt lonely. Often stayed an extra hour and was always the one that Morris turned to.

  ‘Would you join me, Jack?’ Morris asked as he indicated the inglenook seat that stood by the fire. ‘Please, pour yourself a drink. It’s time to relax a little. Nothing more needs doing.’

  Jack paused for a moment, then disappeared into the bar, returning with two glasses of whisky, one considerably larger than the other, which he passed to Morris. He sat on the settee opposite his boss. Both sat in silence, both thoughtful, both enjoying the glow of the fire that created a sense of peace and tranquillity within the grand hall, now empty of guests. It was something to be savoured and they both sipped at their drinks companionably while staring into the fire, watching it until the last of the logs had burnt down and just the embers remained.

  Morris finally spoke. ‘My life’s a mess, Jack. There are so many unanswered questions.’

  ‘Are you thinking of Mrs Pocklington, sir?’

  ‘Every single day, Jack. I miss her so much, but it’s not only that.’

  Jack looked awkwardly down to the floor, then took a sip of his whisky and nodded. ‘I’m sure everything happens for a reason, Mr Pocklington, and at least you have your daughter here now. It must be good to have Mrs Frost back in the fold?’

  Morris thought for a moment and nodded in affirmation. He’d often mentioned Madeleine to Jack and had told
him how disappointed he’d been when she hadn’t attended Josie’s funeral. He still felt an overwhelming sadness at how he’d stood alone by the graveside, with no one to call his own family. But that was in the past now, he had to look forward and it was good to have Madeleine here; in fact he couldn’t wish for anything better. There were so many parts of his life that he’d got wrong, so many things he should have done differently. But being Madeleine’s father wasn’t one of them. He’d been delighted when she’d turned up at Wrea Head Hall. It had been a day he’d dreamed of and meeting her again, seeing how she’d turned into such an intelligent and beautiful young woman, had made his heart swell. Even though he berated himself for having had no real influence in her upbringing.

  He hated the fact that Margaret had taken her away from him. He’d hated the times that he couldn’t see her, couldn’t tuck her up in bed and couldn’t nurse her when he’d known she’d been ill. But her mother had dominated Maddie’s life, had controlled his access and it was only now that he felt a huge sense of guilt for not having been stronger and for not having insisted that he had a right to see his own child. He’d have been willing to care for Jess too; he’d have even brought her up as his own, if only Margaret had allowed it.

  Morris took a deep breath as it occurred to him just how much of Madeleine’s life he’d missed and how much he could never get back. He couldn’t alter any of that now. He couldn’t turn back time, but what he could do was put things right. He had already made her sole beneficiary in his will – had done so after Josie died, even though he was so hurt by her letter. But now he had the chance to finally get to know her – and his beautiful granddaughter, who reminded him so much of Maddie at that age – he knew that he had made the right decision.

  He sipped the whisky in his glass. ‘If only Josie was here. She was so astute, she’d know exactly what to do.’