‘I don’t care what you say,’ Meredith lowered her voice. ‘I’m never leaving here. Never.’
‘You can’t do this, Mam.’ Verity’s words faltered in the air, falling like the dead moths in Meredith’s bedroom. ‘You can’t.’
Allegra looked at both her daughters as if she no longer recognised them. Her eyes raked Verity’s face. ‘This is betrayal and it’s on your shoulders. Get out of my sight and take that wretched child with you.’
Forty-two
The air in the house lay as heavy as old ashes.
Meredith wanted to be somebody else, an ordinary girl with a normal mother. When her sister asked her how she was feeling, she didn’t have an answer. Her emotions swallowed her whole. She was inside herself barely able to speak and when she did her words came out cracked.
‘When did she tell you?’
‘She didn’t,’ Verity said. ‘I heard her talking to Nain, on the telephone.’
‘You should have told me straight away. It’s impossible. She can’t mean it.’
‘I wanted to see if I could make her change her mind first. You came in on us. I’m so sorry.’
Meredith gave a spasm of a smile. ‘Why are you sorry? It’s not as if it’s your idea.’
Verity moved to hug her and Meredith shook her off.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’ Her bones shook with the force of her fear. All she could think was, she couldn’t think. Right then she wouldn’t have cared if Verity had shouted at her or ignored her for the rest of her life, so long as the nightmare wasn’t true and they weren’t leaving Gull House.
She didn’t move. She knew if she tried she would fall over. Her breath hovered in her chest and she looked around and there was nothing, only her mother’s voice.
Take that wretched child with you…
There is a language to loss. Verity sensed it murmuring at the margins of her sister’s days.
Meredith was a crushed thing, a butterfly or a bird at the mercy of a cat.
‘I’m not going, she can’t make me.’
Verity made hot chocolate, sat in the kitchen with her sister in front of the range, watching showers of fire stars dance against the sooty back-plate.
‘Maybe I ought to apologise,’ she said.
‘Apologise for what? She’s the one in the wrong.’ Meredith’s voice sounded old.
‘I don’t have to mean it.’
Their mother’s face hovered between them like a spectre, pronouncing her decision non-negotiable.
‘I mean it,’ Meredith whispered. ‘I’ll run away.’
Verity’s heart sank. Although she knew her sister would hate London with its vastness and din and clatter, she wasn’t about to become her accomplice in some hare-brained scheme.
‘Even if we could, where would we go?’
Meredith’s lip wobbled. ‘I don’t know.’
They both knew there was nowhere to run to.
Verity had never had a real adventure, she now realised. She hadn’t taken any proper risks or been particularly brave.
It isn’t the end of the world…
Her mother’s voice seared itself on her brain, like a burn. Verity understood perfectly well what it was. It wasn’t the end; it was an unknown beginning. She also knew there were times when the only thing it took to change a person’s life forever was a single word.
Betrayal…
For a second, she would have agreed to anything, however hopeless; however crazy.
As if she sensed this, Meredith said, ‘Okay, not proper running away but we have to do something. She’s madder than poor Angharad ever was and no one’s trying to stop her. Even Nain’s acting as if this is normal by the sound of things.’ She trembled with rage. ‘It’s the opposite of normal, so why aren’t we trying to make her stop?’ With each word her agitation grew. ‘I thought she loved me – sometimes, I imagined she loved me better than she loves you, but it’s not true. She hates us both.’
‘Oh, Meri…’
‘You know it. You’ve always known it.’
‘If she knew how you felt…’
‘She does know, of course she knows, she doesn’t care.’ Meredith’s thin shoulders shifted as if she were stiffening them. ‘All she cares about is that disgusting man. What can she possibly see in him?’
Verity didn’t know.
‘And you know what the really awful part is? It’s going to go horribly wrong and we’re going to be miles away from here and there won’t be anyone to save us.’
‘Nain will look after us, Meri. She will; she always does. It’ll be all right. I promise.’
Meredith gave her a look and her words scattered to the ground like little bits of gravel. ‘Don’t make promises you know you can’t keep, Verity. It’ll make you like her. You said I didn’t have to be, so why would you want to? And don’t kid yourself. Nain can’t save us; we have to do it for ourselves.’
Forty-three
Meredith stopped crying.
She swallowed her misery and dried her eyes. She said crying meant Allegra had won and they really would be leaving Gull House. Grief encroached in other ways. She didn’t eat and lost weight so quickly that she shrank before Verity’s eyes. She stopped speaking too, unless it was absolutely necessary. Stubborn, her face a mask of misery, she hung onto the last vestiges of her courage.
‘We could go on a proper hunger strike.’
‘Meri, you’re hardly eating as it is and she hasn’t noticed.’
‘If we go, we won’t come back.’
‘No, don’t say that.’
‘I know it, Verity, the way I know the touch of snow on my face.’
Any love Verity still had for her mother lay under her ribs, hard as a stone and as obdurate.
Verity put her anger somewhere safe. She made a last attempt at persuading her mother to give up on her foolish plan.
‘Please, can’t we at least discuss it?’
Allegra’s mouth was set and wry; not quite a smile, impossible to decipher. She was on the terrace, sitting at the iron table drinking coffee.
Verity stood so still she was barely breathing.
Allegra tilted her cup and Verity risked a glance, caught her mother’s eye over the rim and looked away.
‘Will there ever be a time when you put me first, Verity? I can have exhibitions in London. You have to understand: he knows people. Why would you want to deny me or sabotage my future?’
Idris adored my work … he wanted me to show in London…
And here she was, trading one man’s futile daydream for another. Verity swallowed the thought and said to her mother, ‘What about our future? How does that figure in your grand plan?’
‘You can go to school! It’s what you’ve always wanted. Don’t pretend it isn’t.’
Verity was horrified.
Be careful what you ask for.
‘You cannot make Meredith go to school.’
‘Meredith will be fine. She’ll blossom at school.’
‘So much for your principles.’
‘People change. You’re older; school will be good for both of you. And in any case, I’m your mother; I can do as I please.’
‘Meredith’s right. You really do hate us don’t you?’
Don’t use that word, Verity, only evil people hate…
Allegra started rolling a cigarette. ‘If you say that one more time…’
‘So, when are we going?’
‘When I say we are.’
The house, black-eyed and brooding, closed in as if it already suspected its fate and must chide them.
It’s our home. It knows us.
For the first time, Verity thought she understood what her sister meant when she insisted the house was alive. A girl who rarely concerned herself with other people’s business, she sharpened her senses and began paying attention; to unlocked drawers in her mother’s desk and carelessly scattered correspondence. Unsure of what she was looking for she poked and pried, searching for clues she cou
ld use to thwart her mother’s plans.
And if I find anything, what difference will it make?
She eavesdropped on half-understood conversations between her mother and the man. Like leaves on the wind their words blew away, the snatches she managed to decipher meaningless.
Eventually, snooping made her uncomfortable and in any case she didn’t discover a thing.
Meredith moved into Verity’s room. Exhausted and distraught, for several nights she slept too deeply for dreams, curled into her sister’s bed as if it were a nest.
The twig baby lay in the dark, wrapped in Meredith’s cardigan.
‘Have you seen how the flowers in her hair haven’t wilted?’
Verity didn’t need to look; she knew Meredith was telling the truth.
Waking one night needing the lavatory, as she padded back along the landing, Verity found her thoughts drawn to the blue garden. Making her way across the grass in the thinning light, she realised she was no longer afraid. Angharad’s ghost was now too tragic to be a threat. Each night as she closed her eyes, Verity saw her, reaching out for her dead baby in the still silence, her face turned in supplication. Rather than fear, it was a sense of helplessness she now felt. She wasn’t sure she trusted Meredith’s blind faith that if they buried the twig baby it would somehow make everything all right.
The air stirred around her. Like a reflection in a fly-spotted mirror it was as if only the edges of her eyes worked, distorting what came into view. Something moved and half expecting it to stay where it was, when the image flew at her, Verity was rooted to the spot. She didn’t scream; she was too startled to be scared. Her toe caught against something hard. Looking down at the foot of the wisteria, she saw tiny pieces of stone: parts of one of the cherubs, what looked like pieces of curly hair and a stubby fragment of a baby’s finger, its little stone nail still intact. They had been gathered together, deliberately placed.
You cannot go … not yet … make her safe…
The words weren’t in her head; they had entered Verity’s blood, seeped into her pores and occupied her. She picked up a scrap of the stone cherub and it cut her skin. Her glass bones trembled and she hugged her arms to her chest. A wind whipped through the garden, shaking the trees, rising to a scream and Verity turned toward the house, afraid for it.
Stumbling, wrenching open the gate, she ran, and when she reached her bedroom, slammed the door behind her not caring who she woke.
In the silence the only thing she heard was her ragged breath and her heart as it shook against her ribs.
When she finally gave in to sleep it was dreamless.
In the morning, when her sister woke up, Verity told her what she had seen.
‘She’s a restless soul.’ Meredith said. ‘And she knows Allegra wants us to leave.’
Verity shuddered. Her finger still stung where the stone had nicked it. She sucked at the cut.
‘I thought I’d lost her. Thank you for seeing her again.’ Meredith sighed. ‘I heard a baby last night, in my dream. It breaks my heart; like they broke hers.’
‘And not all broken things can be mended.’
‘Don’t. If she’s been broken into a million pieces, I won’t give up on her. If you had a baby and people stole it, first your heart would shrivel and then you’d die.’
Verity said their childhood was being stolen and it was more far-reaching than a ghost’s baby who might not even be real.
‘You know it’s exactly the same. And you know it’s real.’
Verity sighed. Meredith was right. It was as if she was growing up in front of her eyes.
A tear traced Meredith’s cheek. ‘It’s why I can’t leave. Not just because I can’t leave Gull House, I can’t abandon her. Angharad.’
‘We can’t win, Meri.’
‘We have to.’ She paused. ‘I don’t want my life to be about any future she’s got planned. These are my memories: being here right now. And now Angharad’s part of them too. I’m not going to let Allegra wreck everything or steal my life.’
With the sun drifting through the trees, Meredith went to her grandmother’s garden. She told Verity she needed to be alone for a while and not to worry. Angharad wouldn’t hurt her. She tried to be aware of nothing, only the fluttering in her chest as if the moths were inside her. Lying down amongst the bluebells she asked the Fae to steal her, keep her here forever, even though she knew she was probably too old to be swapped for a changeling.
She remembered believing she could make flowers grow from her fingers. Sunbeams made patterns on her hands. She curled them into fists, made her body as small as possible. No one came for her, and the otherworld she had always believed was as close as a sigh felt as far away as the sun.
I cannot pinpoint the moment I lost hope.
At first I was too traumatised and frightened to protest. There was no question of me leaving, that much was made clear. Still no one came for me.
I had nothing save for the memory of my finger brushing hers, a last sweet kiss and a blanket. The world vanished; a cut appeared, an opening between the world I knew and the one into which I fell. I became invisible and although I passed unseen, I saw. Hidden in my darkness, the ease with which I slipped into this parallel world made me wonder how many other worlds existed, side-by-side, resembling the one we thought we knew.
The world I came from had become a fearful place, the one I was forced into turned equally menacing. Even supposing I’d been accorded a choice, it would have been no choice at all. I imagined myself dead or dying because I couldn’t bear to be alive. Without my child I became weightless, as if we had both died.
And still no one came for me.
Hope became an ephemeral thing made of memory, of soft wind and the delicate scent of bluebells.
The thread of her heart … her touch.
Time died too – withering like frostbitten flowers.
Passing … pausing … gone…
My grief for that half-glimpsed tiny bundle overwhelmed me. I knew she was gone, but I couldn’t let her go. I wasn’t ready for that parting. In spite of my continued pleas, they refused to tell me where she was buried. Once I realised no gain would come from making a scene, I hid myself away until they made me dress and return to work. It was easier to comply; soon they thought me passive and biddable again.
Inside I began to rage and when I regained my strength a hitherto unknown determination to escape rose in me.
If I searched until my dying day, I would find my child’s resting place.
Forty-four
‘I hope I didn’t disturb you.’ There was a hint of insolence in his voice, as if concern for her was the last thing on his mind.
Verity loathed the fact he was coming out of her mother’s bedroom, that she was in her dressing gown. She vowed she wouldn’t leave her room again unless she was fully clothed.
For a big man he walked silently.
Like a wolf.
Verity made her look sharp; the pause calculated. ‘Why would you think you had?’
‘You tell me.’
She could have ignored him; slipped downstairs. The space they occupied felt like a cocoon. Her glass bones trembled.
He watched her, eyes narrowed, as if he still waited for some kind of disclosure from her.
‘Did Meredith wake up too? I thought I heard her. Did she have a bad night?’
Verity swallowed and said Meredith was fine. ‘She’s asleep in my room; it has nothing to do with you.’
For a moment she thought he might challenge her.
‘I was worried.’
‘Don’t be, there’s no need. I take care of my sister.’
‘So everything’s all right then?’
To lend her voice conviction, she took an exaggerated breath. ‘Perfectly, thank you.’
She didn’t care what he believed, or if he thought she was lying. She had heard the undercurrent of disdain in his voice. She was on to him.
Verity tried again to talk to her mother.
<
br /> ‘I don’t trust him. He asks questions about us – personal things. It makes me uncomfortable. Why is he still here?’
‘You’re imagining things.’ Allegra dismissed Verity with a wave of her hand.
When he tried to befriend Meredith, Verity became more concerned. She didn’t need to be. Meredith’s dislike of him was evident; she let him know at every opportunity. His refusal to be intimidated simply made Verity worry all the more.
He didn’t give the impression he was afraid of anything.
‘Angharad doesn’t trust him either,’ Meredith said. ‘He’s one of the bad men.’ She told Verity she could make him leave. ‘I know how and if it doesn’t work, maybe Angharad will help.’
‘Meri, don’t. We have enough on our plate. Don’t start making stupid spells.’
‘They aren’t stupid.’
Verity made her promise not to do anything.
‘Okay, I promise.’ Meredith chewed her lip. ‘It doesn’t mean I shan’t stop willing him to leave.’
‘Why can’t you give him a chance?’ Allegra looked pained, unused to Meredith gainsaying her. ‘It’s not only about you, is it? Think about it for a moment; about what it’s like for me.’ She sat at the iron table, twisting the ends of her poppy-strewn scarf into knots.
Out on the terrace with the sun shining on the bricks, it was possible to believe nothing could be wrong.
‘This isn’t like you, darling’ Allegra said. ‘Why are you being difficult all of a sudden?’ Her voice took on a plaintive tone. ‘It’s your bloody sister, isn’t it, stirring the pot.’
Meredith was astounded. Had she been asked to say one way or the other, in that moment she might have said she hated Allegra. Since the night of the big row, a shift in Meredith’s perception had taken place; a painful recognition that Allegra wasn’t who she thought she was, and what she saw disturbed her.
She stared at her mother, shaking her head
‘What?’ Allegra said. ‘What is it, Meredith?’
‘You; it’s you.’ She dug out a sneer. ‘To accuse Verity of lying is outrageous and totally unjust.’
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