Inside, our footsteps echo around the enormous hall. The stairs sweep away up to the first floor in a whirl of carvings; paintings of every size line the walls. There are portraits of the family who lived here, landscapes, horses, still-lifes of piles of fruit and vases full of flowers – all hung on dark walls faded by time. But something else is different here – the feel of the place. Hopwood Home always feels welcoming. Fallowmill is more sombre…as though something broke here, or went missing a long time ago, and was never quite found again.
It feels a bit like a tomb.
Or a prison.
The woman stops outside a small wooden door marked PRIVATE, tucked discreetly into a corner – so discreetly, in fact, that I completely miss it, and almost pile into Hal’s back. I end up doing a weird sidestep to avoid crashing into him, catching the faintest scent of lemons and green woods as I do.
Judging by the smile Hal’s trying to hide, he’s either amused, charmed or exasperated by this. “Do you want to come? To the archive?”
I open my mouth to reply, because of course I want to come to the archive…and then behind him, I see her raised eyebrow and pinched mouth. I see the pale white patches either side of her nose. “The papers we store here are very delicate. Very fragile. Too much exposure to people will do them no good at all.”
I guess I’m not welcome.
“Then you’re probably better off without me to start with – but I’ll help you go through anything good?” I say.
“You’re sure?”
The curator rests a hand on the doorknob, turning it, opening the door a crack. Beyond it I can see stacks of boxes, rows of cupboards and a couple of narrow desks – the past, lined up and catalogued and inescapable.
I smile, hoping it’s enough to cover everything in my head. “Of course. Come find me when you need me.”
This is the correct answer as far as the curator is concerned, her mouth unpuckers slightly and she nods. She holds out a small square of laminated card to me. “Why don’t you take a look around the house while you wait? This is a guest pass for the house and the grounds. There’s no need to pay. Just show this to anyone who asks – and please, keep to the public areas?”
Like I don’t know what a door marked private means…
I pocket the pass and smile at Hal. “I’ll be around.” He gives me a slightly anxious smile, and before he has a chance to step into the archive, I lay a hand on his arm. He flinches – his eyes flicking down to the spot where I’m touching him – and then smiles at me again, less anxiously this time. A flush creeps up his cheeks. “I hope you find something. Good luck.”
After the curator closes the door behind them, I turn the guest pass around in my pocket. Through the tall windows overlooking the drive, out past the fountain and a formal border of scraggy-looking roses, the lake glints darkly at me.
Baby steps.
I follow the signs that guide visitors around the house, through a chintzy sitting room with a card table set up in the middle, cards laid out as if someone is mid-game. I know the idea is to make the house look like it did when it was still lived in, but the overall effect is creepy, like the players have all left the room at once and could walk back in at any moment. Next is a dining room with a huge table laid with china and crystal and silver. Then there’s another sitting room, and then another and one more, which makes me start to wonder exactly how many rooms anyone really needs for just sitting. And then a dusty sign points to a door that opens onto a small staircase – I’d know a servants’ staircase anywhere. I follow it down to the kitchens, and even though they don’t look anything like our modern industrial kitchen back at the hotel – with its stainless steel units and benches, its ovens and walk-in fridges – I can still see the resemblance. Once upon a time, Hopwood must have looked like this too.
Kitchens lead into pantries and storerooms and laundries and other empty, echoing rooms. Just when I feel like I’m never going to find my way out of the basement, there’s another staircase leading up and up again and out onto a bright landing and a series of bedrooms. Some of them are made up with four-poster beds. I surreptitiously give the mattress of one a prod as I pass. It creaks alarmingly – Mrs Tilney would not be impressed. Finally, there’s a nursery with two little beds and a cot, and a narrow single bed in the corner for a nanny. The cot has a threadbare old-fashioned teddy bear lying on the mattress – he’s obviously meant to be propped up in the corner, but he’s fallen over, and my heart twists because he used to belong to someone. Someone who would have cared that he had fallen down; who would have picked him up and put him right.
“Mum?” I sit up in bed, head splitting, pulse racing, sweat trickling down the back of my neck. “Mum!”
“Flora?” She pushes my bedroom door open, silhouetted against the light from the landing. “What’s wrong?”
“There was a fire, and people were screaming. They couldn’t get out, and I was supposed to help them but I couldn’t, and they wouldn’t stop screaming, and…and…” My voice chokes out as she sits on the end of my bed and pats my hand.
“It was just a dream. The doctor did warn you.”
“It was so real. It was so real. I can’t go back to sleep. Please don’t make me.”
“You need to sleep.”
“But…”
“It’s just a dream. The things in your head can’t hurt you, remember? Now, come on. Back to sleep.”
She closes the door behind her, cutting off the light.
I reach into the cot to sit the teddy bear up again – but a sudden stern cough from the doorway makes me stop. A middle-aged lady in a cardigan is standing there, scowling at me.
“Please don’t touch,” she says, still frowning.
I shuffle past her, head down.
Something about the next section of the house feels different. It’s a study and a couple of…I don’t know, dressing rooms? Rooms for sitting in while you’re waiting until it’s time to go sit in the downstairs rooms? But there are bars on some of the windows – or the ghosts of them, in places. The doors are thicker too, and carry the scars of extra locks and heavy bolts.
I turn back to the scowling cardigan woman and point to the nearest window. “What are the bars for?”
She nods, looking at the sturdy metal bars bolted to the frame on the other side of the glass. “The house was used as an asylum for a while in the Victorian era, and then again just after the First World War. Shell-shocked soldiers mostly, the ones who were never expected to recover. It’s in the guidebook…”
The air curdles and clots around me, suddenly soupy. Menacing. I have a sudden vision of every door slamming, every key turning in every single lock; of bars sprouting from every window sill and trapping me here for ever. I may not have a ton of GCSEs, but even I know that’s what happened to people like me once upon a time – to people with “conditions” like mine. This. Locked doors and barred windows. Being kept away from the world, not so much so it couldn’t damage us, but so we couldn’t damage it. Like a broken brain is somehow contagious.
I think perhaps I’ve had enough of Fallowmill House. I thought coming here would exorcize my ghosts…but now I think it might have given me more.
The library is the only room left. It’s twice the size of the one at Hopwood and, like everything else here, it’s chilly and deserted. I’ve done a full loop of the house (or at least the parts I’m allowed to see) and beyond it I can see the hallway where I started. There are no bars on the windows here, just wide open views out onto the drive and the trees. But it doesn’t feel like Hopwood at all, and a sudden stab of longing for the woods and the maze and Charlie’s borders full of flowers overwhelms me. It’s not just that I feel like I belong at Hopwood – I know its rhythms, its routines, its shifts and its timetables – or that it’s where my friends are, my family. Hopwood makes me feel protected, makes me feel safe. There are no surprises – not like here, where without warning a bedroom becomes a prison cell and there are bolts on the doors ready
to trap you. Hopwood feels like a sanctuary, but the world is full of Fallowmills. Even the books in the library here are kept behind locked mesh doors – what, to keep them safe? But who decides what is safe and what isn’t?
What would it take for these doors to slam, for these locks to be turned against me?
No. I keep my own keys. My doors, my locks. My head.
Out in the entrance hall, a door closes and soft footsteps squeak across the floor. A familiar head pokes around the other door to the library – looking the wrong way first, and then turning towards me with a smile. I wipe away everything I was thinking – the bars, the bolts, all of it – before he can see.
So that he won’t know.
“Hey!” He lopes over, his face glowing with excitement. My heart skips again.
“How did it go?”
“The archive here is amazing. Really amazing. There’s so much – things about the house, about the history of it, everyone who lived here…It’s—”
“Amazing?” I finish for him, trying not to laugh.
“Amazing. Exactly. Anyway, I think I found something.”
“You did?”
“Come and look.”
And he stretches out a hand – almost as though he’s about to take mine – before suddenly snatching his fingers back at the last instant, a fraction of a second before they touch me, so close I can actually feel the warmth from his skin before he pulls away. Instead, he tugs his fingers through his hair. “So, umm, yeah. Come on – you have to see it!”
Beyond the small wooden PRIVATE door, the archive is exactly as cluttered as it looked from my first glimpse of it. Filing cabinets and stacks of old wooden drawers line the walls, and the whole place smells of dust and stale coffee. A window at the back of the room has been covered with a milky-white film to keep the sun out – and, judging by the stuffy feel of the place, the air too. Not that Hal seems to notice any of that, because he makes a beeline straight for the cluttered old desk in the middle of it all, where the curator is hovering like an exam invigilator.
Footsteps walking, slow and measured, up and down the aisles between the desks…
The steady, endless tick-tick-tick of the clock…
Dozens of pairs of eyes wide, all turned towards me…
The whispering, the sound of papers falling, shuffling…
“This is it.” Hal points at a single page, centred in the middle of an old-fashioned desk blotter. I go to pick it up, but the curator makes a squawky disapproving sound in the back of her throat, and Hal ducks around me, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Apparently, we’ve been doing it all wrong. You have to keep them flat. I never knew that.”
“Oh. Right.” I peer at the sheet. It looks grubby, surrounded by the pristine white blotting paper, and old. “So how do we turn it over?”
The curator snorts. “You don’t. I will.”
Hal flashes me a look that’s somewhere between an eye-roll and a grin. It’s conspiratorial – the kind of look shared between friends.
Are we friends?
My heart does a full barrel-roll in my chest. I lean closer to the letter and hope nobody else noticed.
Because it’s been kept in an archive, and probably better looked after than all the pages at Hopwood, the ink is less faded and easier to read. The handwriting is nothing like Albie’s – it’s much spikier, much more untidy. Familiar, though…and realizing whose it is feels like somebody kicking me.
“It’s Iris. This is Iris, isn’t it?”
“It’s Iris. She’s signed it. But that’s not the best part.” Hal is so close that I can feel his hair brushing against mine as he leans over the letter alongside me; I can see the twist in his finger as he points to lines of writing – careful not to actually touch them with the stern curator hovering behind us and peering over our shoulders.
“‘To my dearest Jane…’” I can feel the click as my jaw drops. “She’s writing back to her!”
“Maybe, or this one might come first. Doesn’t matter. She knew someone who lived here and they were writing to each other.” He drops his voice to a whisper. “This is where Jane sent her letter from. I didn’t even know that.”
“Coincidence?”
“I told you, I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I,” I whisper back. “So who is Jane?”
“If I may?” the curator chips in. “There was a Jane Campbell working in the household here just before the First World War. She was part of the kitchen staff.”
“Jane Campbell?” My head spins.
Hal nods, and his smile is so wide it more than lights up the room. “She has to be related to Iris. Her sister, I reckon.”
I lean even closer over the paper, following the lines of letters.
How can I keep it to myself, when my heart feels like it could burst at any moment? How can I pretend that the world, my world, my life, is the same as it always was, now it has him in it?
“Is she talking about—”
Hal cuts me off with a loud cough and a series of long sniffs. I stare at him.
“The dust,” he says, apologizing not to me but to the curator. “Allergies.” But as he turns back to the desk, rubbing at the end of his nose, he presses a finger to his lips so only I can see. “Not here,” he whispers.
After the tour of the gardens I slipped away from the rest of the party, back to the grotto, and I whispered his name into the water in the River God’s cave.
“What does that mean?” I stand up, looking from the letter to the curator. Hal might not want to tell her everything, but she must know what this is.
“The grotto? It’s part of the landscaping – they were very fashionable when the gardens were laid out in the eighteenth century. It’s down by the lake…”
Me, scrolling through other people’s photos, looking for the space where I wasn’t, water droplets falling like confetti…
She’s still talking. “…statue of a nymph and of an unnamed river god – probably inspired by Virgil’s—”
“Can we see it?” It’s too fast, too high, too desperate. Too manic. “I mean, is it open to the public?”
“Of course.” She frowns at me, and a crease appears between her eyes. “The gardens are all open to the public.”
“Like in this letter – when she says about touring the gardens?”
“The Russell-Olivers – the family who owned the house – believed in opening the gardens to visitors even while the estate was privately owned. There were regular guided tours for groups. It might seem strange to us, but they saw it as part of their…let’s call it civic duty, being part of the upper class. One of the conditions of the sale, when it was agreed, was that the gardens would always remain open. Maybe if this…Iris?…you’re looking for knew someone, or had a relative working here, she visited and took a tour.”
“Oh! Right.”
My feet are itching to leave – even with this letter of Iris’s, this piece of her, under my hands. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter as much as the grotto does; it doesn’t seem as big a part of the puzzle. I want to be where she was. I want to listen to the echo of her calling his name into the water. She doesn’t even mention his name…but who else could it be?
Albie.
Albie and Iris.
Even the quickest glance across at Hal tells me he feels the same. He wants to be out of the house, looking for them. He thanks the curator and shakes her hand, and we both step out into the hallway.
“Told you I found something,” he says.
“Why didn’t you want…” I check over my shoulder, but the little door has already closed. We head back outside, shrugging off the gloom. “Why didn’t you want me to say anything about Albie?”
“Because there’s nothing about him in the letter – and I didn’t tell her that’s what we were looking for. I told her I was researching…” He frowns. “Actually, I don’t remember exactly what I told her. I nicked it from the title of a book I saw when my mate at UCL sn
uck me into the history library there.” His face falls even further.
“They snuck you into the library? Why?” Of all the places I could imagine Hal Waverley wanting to be smuggled into, a university library probably wouldn’t have been top of the list.
“Oh, long story.” He clears his throat and mutters something under his breath. It sounds a lot like “Another life.”
My ribs tighten around my heart, squeezing it hard.
He shakes the thought away and brightens again. “Anyway, I didn’t want to tell her exactly what we were looking for so I made something up. It seemed to work.”
“Okay, but why?” Somewhere nearby, there’s a sound that could be a plane going over…or could be thunder. The sky that was mostly blue when we arrived is definitely looking a lot less blue now. It is, in fact, the colour of lead.
“Because…I don’t know. I thought if she knew, she’d…”
“Try and take over?”
He scrunches up his nose, nodding. “Yeah. That. Does it sound stupid?”
Following him down the steps to the enormous driveway, I open my mouth to tell him that I know exactly how he feels – that I feel the same. That I want to keep this story close, keep it secret.
Keep it our secret.
But I can’t. And I don’t. Instead, I change the subject.
“Anything else interesting in there?”
“How about this?” He spins on his heel, walking backwards down the last couple of steps. “Hopwood wasn’t always called Hopwood Home – or even Hopwood House. And it definitely wasn’t called that in 1913. There was an old newspaper article in the archive – about the renaming of the old Holmwood house after the nearest village.”
“Which would be Hopwood! So it did change from the family name to the village. It really is the right place – the one you’ve been looking for!”
“Yep. And then…”
“History happened, and everybody forgot.” It takes all my willpower not to jump down the last step. So much energy is buzzing around under my skin that if I don’t let it out, I’ll split open.
The Pieces of Ourselves Page 10