by Anne Fine
Was there some hiding place under the step?
It was too dark to see, so I was careful not to move a muscle till I heard my uncle’s cheery tones. ‘Well, then! Fruit pies it shall be! And plenty of cream, remember, Martha, now that we have a growing boy about the house!’
A door slammed. Then another. I waited to see if Martha came to check that I was safely gone. But she’d no doubt assumed I’d had the sense to scurry up as fast as possible, not sit in terror lest a creak of stair gave me away.
So I bent down to lift the hook I’d found beneath the rim. And when I gave the gentlest of pushes, part of the facing of the stair tipped back, as if on a hinge. I slid down a couple of steps and, on my knees, reached into the little hidden space I’d found.
Did I touch spiders? I’ve no doubt! I’m almost sure I felt them scuttling over my hand as I reached round in all that dust of years. What did I feel? Soft leather. Was it a wallet? How long had it been abandoned there? Perhaps, I thought, no one in this whole house knew of its presence except me.
And so I drew it out, and since I could not see what I was holding, tucked it away in even deeper dark – under my jerkin – and crept on up the stairs and through the door that led out onto the landing, then past my uncle’s room and across to my attic staircase door.
To find it bolted shut.
Here was a brand-new terror! Had my uncle taken to locking me in at night? I could go through the door, but how, then, could I slide the bolt back into place behind me? Should I find a place to hide till he shot it back at dawn, thinking he’d freed me? Or should I sleep in my own bed, and face his wrath in the morning: ‘What? Were you out prowling yet again?’
The very thought was enough to bring me to my senses. Let him believe he’d had me safely caged the whole night long! I crept back down the stairs, and past the dining table at which he had enjoyed tormenting me such a short time before, into the little room beyond, flooded with moonlight.
I settled in the largest chair and pulled the small leather package that I’d found out of my jerkin. Now I would look for secrets! I picked off stray strands of cobweb and blew away dust, and wiped my fingers down my jerkin till they were clean enough to pull the wallet open.
No, it was not a wallet but a book. Even in moonlight I could see that someone had covered the first page with swirling patterns. And, on the next, penned in a childish form of a familiar hand, I saw the first words:
Liliana: her private diary
Was this what my uncle had in mind when he described my mother as forever scribbling secrets? I took the book to where the moonlight fell more strongly over the page. And there I sat on dusty floorboards for an hour or so, turning the pages to read her childhood worries about the squirrel with an injured leg, the way her governess scolded her careless stitching, accounts of her dreams – even her cunning plan to coax Thomas into guessing that a better, bigger rabbit pen would be the best gift for her coming birthday.
I turned the page to find another worry:
Why does Jack act so meanly? It seems to me that he lives on a seesaw. He can be cheery and open, then, in an instant, full of spite. Sometimes I watch him as a choice is made, and it’s as if he ponders gentleness, then invites devilry only because it seems to him to be more interesting – perhaps more fun. But Mother says that habits begin as cobwebs, then turn into cables that will hold you fast. And when we were in church the minister spoke warmly of how we must train ourselves to step away from the dark path or it will draw us ever closer to the pit. And I believe that, as he said those words, he looked particularly at Jack. So now I hope with all my heart that Jack will change his naughty ways, for only today we came across him on the steps tormenting poor little Jolyon, and Edmund had to rebuke him for holding back the ball till Jolyon cried.
I turned the page. But she’d moved on to write of stumbling as she climbed the river bank and scraping her knees. I laid the journal down, remembering what the Marlows’ vicar had said in church as I sat there with Sophie. ‘The devil can make no headway if he has no help.’
Had he been right? Is that what had gone wrong with young Jack Severn? Had he invited some sort of devil in? I pushed the diary safely away, deep in a pocket; but somehow the very thought of someone playing games with wickedness turned it into the worst of nights. I tossed about in that huge, musty chair, dreaming of horrors and waking at every creak or whisper of the old house. Still, even that was better than returning to my room, alerting the captain to my midnight wanderings and tipping his mood into the same fierce irritation that I had faced the day before.
And yet at breakfast he was a different man. ‘Daniel!’ he greeted me. ‘Look at the morning! Such bright sun! Such crisp air! Today I must teach you how to be a countryman. Which shall we try our luck at first? Shooting or fishing?’
I had no wish to learn to kill any poor creature. But he was in such a cheery mood that only a braver boy than I would have dared cross him. The thought of some fine, sunlit bird caught short in flight and falling to the earth with bloodied feathers sickened me so much that, when he pressed me, ‘Come, boy! Choose your sport!’ I plumped for fishing.
‘To the river, then! Martha will find you something warm to wear. I’ll fetch the rods. We’ll meet down at the bridge.’
He went off one way, I went off the other, to find Martha dealing cutlery into a drawer. ‘Good morning, Martha. I come to ask you for something warmer than this jerkin to see me through a morning by the river.’
She pointed to the door on which hung two drab jackets. ‘You can take Thomas’s and, in return, carry down something to warm him while he clears the Devil Walks.’
I shivered at the memory. ‘It’s a cold place.’
‘Yes. Cold and sad.’
She handed me a basket in which she’d put a jar of soup and a hunk of bread, and I set off across the lawns towards the Devil Walks. As soon as I was through the gate I felt the chill, even through all the wool of Thomas’s jacket. Round and round I walked, deeper and deeper in shadow, until at last I stepped out into the clearing.
The circle of grass smelled freshly cut, and in the middle Thomas stood beside one of the slabs of stone.
Seeing me swamped in gardener’s tweed, he chuckled. ‘Off for a morning’s sport?’
I made a rueful face as I put down the basket. ‘I fear my uncle is determined to make a proper man of me.’
He laughed. ‘Then I’m the lucky one, here with the good things Martha’s sent.’ He leaned his rake against the hedge behind and reached for the jar of soup.
Seeing the rake begin to slip, I stepped across to catch it by the handle and, turning back, noticed a pattern carved on the nearest stone.
I looked more closely. Under the moss I thought that I could make out faded letters:
olyo
Into my mind sprang the name I’d seen in my mother’s diary. ‘Does that say Jolyon?’
Thomas nodded.
‘Is it a grave?’ I waved a hand towards the other stones. ‘Are they all graves? All family graves?’ Turning round to peer more carefully at each in turn, I made out enough lettering to read aloud: ‘A deeply loving mother … The kindest father … Dearly beloved Samuel … In memory of Edmund … All dead?’
I knew the world was filled with horrors. Still, for one family this seemed the grimmest litany of grief. Was this, I wondered, part of the reason why my mother fled from home – because the place seemed cursed?
Again, Thomas was nodding. ‘Yes. All dead.’
‘But how?’
He shrugged. ‘What does it matter now? Death’s all one story. Jolyon died young in his bed. Samuel was killed in the woods. And Edmund – Liliana’s precious Edmund – was lost at sea.’
‘It is the saddest story! Three brothers out of four!’
‘Four?’ For just a moment Thomas looked confused. Then his face cleared. ‘Ah, yes. Count in her stepbrother, and there were four.’
Here was another surprise! So Captain Severn was not m
y mother’s brother from birth. And I’ll confess that as I walked away, back round the spiral of the Devil Walks, I felt as if a load rolled off my shoulders. If he was no real brother of my mother’s, then surely the world had far less of a right to blame my mother for hiding him from me – and me from him.
He was not part of my blood family. No proper uncle at all! My obligation to stay was, in an instant, gone. And at the very thought my heart lifted and my spirits soared. I think that I was even singing softly to myself as I strolled down the short cut through the shrubbery and on to the river where the captain stood, flicking his rod back and forth over the water.
‘Ah! There you are at last! Our lesson begins! Now, seize the rod, Daniel. Wrap your fingers round – like so! And so!’
He was a tireless taskmaster. It seemed an age before he would declare my clumsy casting ‘good enough not to disgrace a novice’. Then we stood side by side, trailing our lines. Fearing that if I left him to brood in silence his mood would change and he might start to question me as fiercely as he had the night before, I begged him, ‘Tell me some more about your life at sea. Were you adventuring? Or were you busy in trade?’
‘Hard to do one without the other in most of the places we anchored.’ And out the stories of his old life poured as I relentlessly kept steering my questions down one track after another. ‘So, Uncle, did you never want to marry?’
He roared with laughter. ‘Me? Marry? And be forced to keep a roof over some lady’s head while she talks nonsense to the babies she dandles on her knee?’
I was confused. ‘But you already have a house that’s more than fit to shelter any family.’
‘This place?’ He gave a small, contemptuous smile. ‘Lord, boy! I have a finer destiny mapped out for me than mouldering in this backwater. I’ll soon be gone.’
‘Gone?’
He chuckled quietly to himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Gone in as little time as it can take for one thing to be found’ – he looked at me the same way foxes in my nursery tales looked at the chickens, and added quietly – ‘and yet another lost.’
The mischief in his look disquieted me so much I let my rod drop almost to the water. He leaned across. ‘Don’t jerk your line that way! Your catch will barely have been hooked before you lose it!’
And so began another lesson. But I can’t claim I pleased my tutor, because my freshly rising fears had turned me stupid and clumsy. The rod lay heavy in my hand. My arms were tired.
Finally the captain noticed that, as time passed, I shifted the rod’s weight ever more frequently from one hand to the other.
‘You’ve had enough for the moment,’ he declared. ‘And it was fair enough, for a first try. But I shall stay – and possibly do better for an hour or two without you stirring up the water at my side.’ He took my rod. ‘Leave that on the bank with me. And, in the meantime, do me the favour of asking Martha to send Thomas along with something to keep me in spirits.’
I looked down at my red raw palms, and his dismissal felt like the happiest reprieve. ‘I’ll tell her. I’ll go now.’
And gratefully I slipped away from him, into the woods.
I took the basket Martha filled to Thomas, who had left the Devil Walks and was now dragging dead wood from the shrubbery. He smiled. ‘So you’ve become the kitchen boy.’ Seeing me wince as a stray strand of wicker from the handle of the basket scraped at my skin, he took my hands in his and turned them over.
‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Now I see why it’s me who has to take the basket down to your uncle. You have already tired of manly sports.’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘And of his grisly tales of warring tribes who feast on their enemies’ brains, and kill small squealing children for a sacrifice.’
‘And carve their horrid little wooden dolls to look like living people!’
He spoke with such contempt he made me curious. After all, Mrs Golightly must have been carved to look at least a little like my grandmother for her to end up making Sophie think she was the mirror image of my mother. But I had kept the secret of my one inheritance well enough not to want to mention it now. So all I said was, ‘But Martha told me you yourself made Liliana a doll’s house.’
He shuddered. ‘Not for the sort of doll the captain talks of – fiendish things with strange and ancient powers.’
‘Ancient powers?’
He grinned. ‘Oh, not by rising to life and growing large and strangling you in your sleep. No, much more cunningly. It is a sort of magic. Voodoo, the captain calls it. You cast your spell. And after that the doll, and whoever it was you made it for, are intertwined till death. If you torment the doll, your enemy writhes in misery. Shower favours on it and your friend will thrive.’
I saw again the grey engravings of the Caribbean mangrove swamps, and memories of things that haunted me so long ago rose in my mind. If I’d been left to brood I surely would have hit upon my uncle’s secret even then. But Thomas had had more than enough of tales of savages. And of my worries. ‘No need to fear the captain will come back to order you down to the river for yet another lesson. Once his rod’s over the water he’s lost for hours.’
But I was not convinced. And so, my errand done, I went back to the kitchen where Martha was at work on her pies. I watched her as she spooned out flour, then, sliding onto a chair, I took a couple of apples from the pile in front of me. ‘Shall I peel these for you?’
She handed me the paring knife then moved along the table, back to her pastry bowl. Knowing she’d be more free with what she said if she believed that I already knew my mother’s story, I framed the first of my questions with great care.
‘You knew my mother’s brothers too, of course. Tell me about them.’
‘Her brothers?’ A shadow crossed her face. ‘Oh, how you would have loved them! This house was such a happy place when they were all alive.’
I took a chance with weasel words – half guess and half invention. ‘I’m sure my mother wept so when she thought of them that only a brute could have forced her to tell the story of her family more clearly.’
She shrugged. ‘Happiness leaves no mark, so there was little story to tell until the children’s father fell from his horse a week after Jolyon’s birth.’ She sighed. ‘The house was bleak with grief, and it was two long years before Liliana’s mother dried her tears enough to travel off to London to sign some last few papers. And it was there she met George Severn, whose own poor wife had died some years before. They fell in love and married, and since her new husband could boast no house or fortune of his own, he joined her here, bringing his only son.’
‘The captain.’
‘He was young Jack back then.’
‘What was he like?’
Inside the mixing bowl, her fingers stilled. I had the feeling she was determined to be fair about her first impression of this half-grown boy who’d joined her precious family.
She forced a smile. ‘Oh, just another cheerful, impudent lad with locks of jet-black hair falling across his face.’
‘Jet-black?’
She chuckled at my surprise. ‘Oh, yes. Look at him now, and you’d not recognize him as the same Jack Severn who prowled around this house so restlessly, counting the days till he was old enough to go to sea. Some say his hair was bleached by tropic sun, and others whisper that he had a fright so horrid that it turned white overnight.’
‘Which does he say?’
Her mouth pursed, and it took a moment or two for her to answer guardedly, ‘You’ll find that what the captain says does not always settle a story.’
Hastily I led my questioning back, away from her discomfort. ‘But when he first came to this house?’
‘Why, it was mostly all smiles. The children’s mother found herself happy again, and certainly she’d lit upon an excellent union because the captain’s father was a gentle man, easy with all. Samuel and Edmund and Liliana tried hard to offer friendship to their new stepbrother. They did their best to ignore his shifting moods and his occasional spi
te.’
Here was the selfsame word my mother used of Jack in her diary. So, ‘Spite?’ I repeated softly.
‘Oh, yes. He could be harsh, and though but a child himself, still he would say cruel things about the merry games the others played together. Often there was contempt about his manner, as if Jack felt himself destined for greater things than anyone round him. “When I am grown,” he told us constantly, “I will make such a fortune that even a fine house like this will be beneath my notice.”’
‘Then he aimed high!’
‘So we all thought. Indeed, George Severn would laugh and shake a finger at his son. “Take care, Jack! Better to praise your dear stepmother for the fine home she’s given you than talk it down in favour of some dream.” Then, in an instant, Jack’s mood would change. He’d turn and, grinning to show that he’d meant no offence, he’d beg the children’s mother for pardon, praising the very flagstones on which he stood.’
‘And was he always forgiven?’
‘Oh, every time. I think we all knew Jack was born with an unsettled nature. One minute up, next minute down. One moment merry and the next cantankerous. It was as if the devil and an angel were wrestling constantly for his soul. Sometimes the one stood behind him, sometimes the other. Indeed, I remember one of the stable lads saying to Edmund once, “Give your stepbrother Jack a stick, and it’s a wager whether he’ll choose to use it to beat down weeds or kill his own best friend.”’
We sat in silence for a while. Where Martha cast her mind, I could not tell. But I was thinking of the troubling ways in which my step-uncle had blown, first hot, then cold with me since I arrived.
At last I dared to ask, ‘This stable lad – did he say this of Jack before or after the first of the brothers’ deaths?’
She shot me a strange look, as if the very fact I had to ask the question puzzled her. But then, perhaps reminding herself that it was no strange thing for someone as young as I to learn a family story back to front, and know some parts of it and not the others, she replied, ‘It was before.’ Her face set. ‘The first death was young Jolyon’s. He was no more than five years old. A chubby, happy fellow – the last child in the world you’d think to come across in bed one morning, black and blue around the face, with all life fled.’