by Ben Cheetham
The robin turned away and bobbed along the driveway. It fluttered up onto the rim of the fountain – a stone bowl shaped like a church font with a column of lions’ heads spouting water from their mouths at its centre. “It’s going to have a bath,” said Adam, but the robin turned to look inquisitively at them again.
“What a tame little thing,” said Ella. “I wonder if Rozen used to feed it.”
“Maybe she sent it to spy on us.”
Ella smiled at Adam’s playful tone. She’d wondered whether she would ever hear it again. She said to the robin, “I’m sorry little fellow, we haven’t got any food for you.”
As they approached the front door, Adam peered up at the stained glass window. It depicted a tree with deep roots and wide-spreading branches. His gaze moved to the gargoyles. One appeared to be some sort of imp or monkey, sticking out an obscenely long tongue. The other was a winged creature with a goat-like face and horns. “Now they’re scary.” He pointed to the winged gargoyle. “That one looks a bit like your mum.”
“Hey.” Ella nudged him in the ribs.
Grinning, he held up the key. “Shall we?”
He slid the key into an ornate lock, turned it with a clunk and opened the heavy door. They stepped into a pleasantly cool entrance hall every bit as impressive as the house’s exterior. Two black wrought-iron chandeliers dangled from a high ceiling with fruit-and-foliage cornice-mouldings. Glossy parquet floors were covered by plush dark red and gold rugs that complemented the wallpaper. To the left was a broad, cantilevered staircase supported by stone pillars. To the right was a large white marble fireplace with a dark oak surround. The hall was flooded with a rainbow of light from the window. Beeswax polish scented the air.
Adam’s gaze lingered on a painting in a gold-leaf frame above the fireplace – a portrait of a woman in a long black dress. Strings of pearls hung from her swan-neck. A white fur stole was wrapped around her slender shoulders. Her face was pale with thin red lips, a sharp nose and dark eyes bordered by even darker bobbed hair. Apart from her lips and a few muted touches of colour, the painting was almost monochrome.
“That’s got to be Rozen’s mother,” remarked Adam. “The resemblance is unmistakable.”
“She looks sad,” said Ella.
“Wouldn’t you be if I was killed in a war?”
“I bet she never loved anyone again after her husband died. You can see it in her eyes.”
Adam gave Ella’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Where shall we explore first?”
She drew him towards an arched door. It led into a dining room. A long sturdy oak dining table and fourteen chairs with barley-twist legs occupied the centre of the room. Two large tapestries draped the walls – one depicting a unicorn rearing on its hind legs, the other a winged lion in flight. There was another marble fireplace, its mantelpiece bookended by porcelain wolves. A door in the far wall led into a room furnished with a pair of stiff-backed sofas and several matching armchairs arranged around an elegant coffee-table. The walls were hung with desolate paintings of stormy seas and shipwrecks. A bay window overlooked the side garden.
“This must be the living room,” said Ella.
Adam put on a posh accent. “Actually my dear I think you’ll find it’s the drawing room. That’s where the ladies withdraw to after dinner, leaving the gentlemen to talk business and politics and other topics beyond the grasp of the female intellect.”
Ella slid him a look that suggested he was skating on thin ice.
They returned to the dining room. A third door led to a large, sun-splashed room at the back of the house. French doors overlooked a patio, beyond which a long lawn sloped gently towards the sparkling sea. A grandfather clock adorned with carved wooden foliage ticked in one corner. There were more tapestries and paintings of mythical birds and beasts. A stag’s head with immense antlers stared down from over a deeply recessed stone fireplace. In front of the hearth were a shabby but comfortable looking three-piece-suite and a brown, somewhat moth-eaten bearskin rug with the head still attached.
“This is the living room,” said Adam.
“Actually I think you’ll find this is more accurately called the sitting room.”
Smiling at Ella’s touché, he pointed to the stag’s head and the bearskin rug. “I wonder if Walter Lewarne shot those?”
“Who knows, but they would have to go.”
“Why? I like them.” Adam stroked the bearskin. “It’s beautifully soft. Just picture us curling up on it in front of a roaring fire.”
They continued exploring. The next room was a wood-panelled games room with a red-baize snooker table, studded-leather armchairs and a walnut poker table. Then came a small, dark wood library with walls of dusty antique books – some so old their spines had disintegrated. There were shelves of morning and evening prayer books, along with fiction and poetry. “This lot must be worth a fortune,” said Adam. “Keats, Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe... I could happily spend my days here just reading and looking at the view.”
“What about writing your own books?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t need to write anymore if we lived here.”
Ella made a dubious noise. Adam had threatened to give up writing before, but they both knew it would never happen. As he’d said numerous times since his writer’s block kicked-in – if there was one thing he hated more than writing it was not writing.
After the library came a study with a green leather-topped desk and a window facing the pond. Then a kitchen with a flagstone floor, a Rayburn, a jumble of cupboards, a well-used table, four mismatched chairs, a gaping fireplace and a big pantry. Then a laundry room with a twin-tub and a ceiling-mounted clothes drying rack. Then a broom-cupboard as big as their London kitchen. They lingered for a while in the sultry warmth of the orangery, admiring the exotic plants and flowers while dodging drips of condensation from the glass roof.
They almost missed the final downstairs door which was shrouded in shadows beneath the staircase. A brass plaque was inscribed with ‘The Lewarne Room’. The door it was attached to opened onto a long, gloomy room. A galaxy of dust motes was suspended in the light bleeding through closed wooden shutters. The floor was tiled with a red fleur de lis pattern. Above wooden panelling, the walls and ceiling were papered with the same design. A red velvet sofa and armchair faced each other in front of an enormous stone fireplace. Silver candelabra with red candlesticks occupied a pair of pedestals at opposite sides of the room. There was a musty, closed-in smell, as if no one had been in there in a long time. The shutters squeaked as Adam opened them. The room glowed luridly in the sunlight.
“I think that’s the first time they’ve been opened for a hundred years,” he said. He ran his fingers over the lustrous green-and-black spotted pedestals. “This is serpentine. The rock that gives the peninsula its name. It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Yes.” Ella pointed to a pair of paintings in the alcoves that flanked the fireplace. “They’re a bit sinister.” One painting was of a mother and child. The child – little more than a cherubic baby – was being cradled towards its mother’s milk-swollen breast. Its eyes were wide with anticipation. The mother’s eyes were so heavy-lidded that she almost appeared to be sleeping. In the other painting the same child was being torn from its horrified mother’s arms by a heavily muscled man. With one thick-knuckled hand, the man was wrenching back the child’s head. With the other he was thrusting a dagger into its throat. A lacquered wooden panel above the fireplace was carved with four words. “They are no more,” read Ella. “I wonder what that means?”
“It sounds like some sort of Biblical reference.”
Ella shuddered. “I don’t like it in here.”
“It’s definitely an atmospheric room.”
Adam looked at a framed photo leaning next to one of the candelabra. A woman, a girl and a man were seated side-by-side on the room’s red sofa. The waifish young woman was wearing a close-fitting black dress that came down to just below her knees. She held h
erself rigid-backed, chin high. Her lips were a straight line. Her bobbed wavy blonde hair was styled into a side-parting. She seemed to be looking past the camera. The girl was maybe twelve or thirteen-years-old. She was sitting equally stiffly in a red satin Alice dress. Her long light-brown hair was centre-parted. She had the same delicate but full-lipped features as the woman. Her big brown eyes were staring expressionlessly into the camera. Next to her was a stocky man in a stylishly cut grey suit and open-necked white shirt. In contrast to his companions, he was lounging against the cushions. He had swept back silvery-black hair, deep-set eyes, a squashed boxer’s nose and a somewhat seedy smile. He exuded a kind of louche arrogance.
“This must be George, Sofia and Heloise,” said Adam. He added sarcastically, “Happy looking bunch, aren’t they? I wonder if they–”
“Don’t,” broke in Ella.
“What do you mean, don’t? You haven’t heard what I was going to say.”
“You were about to make some jokey comment about what might have happened to them. But don’t. Not here.”
Adam held up his hands in mock innocence. He approached the other pedestal on which there stood a grainy black-and-white photo. A brass plaque on its frame was engraved with ‘Walter Lewarne. 1915’. A slim man in a country gentlemen’s three-piece suit was standing side-on in front of a tall arched mirror set between curtains. He was clean-shaven with almost femininely delicate, high-boned features and centre-parted short, dark hair. He was looking into the mirror rather than at the camera. There was a curl to his lips as if he was disgusted by what he saw.
“What does he find so interesting about his own reflection?” wondered Adam.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think he liked what he saw.”
Adam approached the front exterior wall and traced his fingers along a spidery crack that threaded up from the wood panelling to the ceiling. “Looks like there’s some movement in the walls here.”
Ella made an uninterested, “Mm,” and headed for the door. “Let’s look upstairs.”
Adam turned to follow her, but hesitated and cocked an ear. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“I heard a gurgling. Like running water.”
“I don’t hear it.”
Adam listened again. The sound had disappeared beyond the periphery of his hearing. “Neither do I now.”
They ascended the broad staircase past more tapestries. The landing was colourfully illuminated by a rear window the same dimensions as the one at the front of the house. The stained glass was a storm-tossed collection of glittering blue and turquoise. Looking back and forth between the windows gave Adam the impression that he was in a tunnel bookended by the land and sea. A wood-panelled, red-carpeted hallway stretched away from either side of the landing. There were eleven doors – five on one side and six on the other.
“Shall we split up?” suggested Adam. “Otherwise this will take all day.”
“No chance.” Ella hooked her arm through his.
He gave a smiling shake of his head. “If we’re going to live here, you’ll to have to get over this twitchiness.”
“That’s a big if.”
“I don’t think so. I got the distinct impression Rozen’s made up her mind that we’re the ones.”
“She said the final decision isn’t hers to make.”
“Then whose is it? Her mother’s?” Adam rolled his eyes as if to say, Give me a break.
Ella squeezed his arm sharply. “Please, Adam, I asked you not to talk like that here.”
He pulled his arm free and peered behind a tapestry.
“What are you doing?” asked Ella.
“Looking for hidden microphones, because that’s the only way anyone else will hear us.”
“This obviously isn’t some kind of reality TV setup. This is for real.”
“Yeah, it’s very real. Unlike all the nonsense about this place being haunted. If something’s going to make me think twice about living here, it’s not the stories Rozen told us. It’s that she really believes they’re true.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she’s a vulnerable old lady and I don’t want to take advantage of that.”
“She doesn’t seem particularly vulnerable to me. She seems as if–” Ella broke off, cocking her head as a bell began to toll. “Is that coming from inside or outside the house?”
“Outside, I think. There was a church in that hamlet we passed through.”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from that far away.”
“Could be the grandfather clock.”
A final ding! rang out more loudly than the preceding ones. “How many did you count?” asked Ella.
“Twelve.”
“I counted thirteen.”
“Well you must have counted wrong. Unless the clock’s faulty. What were you going to say about Rozen?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let’s finish looking around.”
The nearest door led into a bedroom cluttered with hefty oak furniture. There was a four-poster bed whose posts were fashioned into the same barley-twist as the dining room furniture. At its foot was a chaise longue. A full-length wall-mounted mirror occupied an alcove to one side of a granite fireplace. A stuffed peacock eyed them beadily from its perch on the mantelpiece. The walls were covered with amateurish paintings of animals – mainly birds – and framed flower pressings. In a corner there was an antique rocking-horse with a threadbare teddy-bear astride its saddle. On one of the bedside tables there was an antiquated rotary dial telephone. Windows opened onto a balcony overlooking the front garden.
“I get the feeling this was Rozen’s room,” said Ella, perusing the paintings.
Adam opened the windows and drank in the view. The garden wall only ran along the front. The rest of the garden was sheltered by a tall hedge, from beyond which came the soft, relentless sound of waves washing the cliffs. “It might be ours soon.”
Ella’s forehead wrinkled.
“What’s that look about?” asked Adam.
“I’m just trying to imagine the three of us rattling around this house. Do we really need somewhere like this?”
Adam’s voice was suddenly passionate. “It’s not only about the house. Like Rozen said, there’s a magic to this place. I’m not talking about something supernatural. I’m talking about fresh air and beauty. Henry could heal here. We all could.” He took her hand again, drew her into an embrace and kissed her.
When Ella pulled her lips from his there were tears in her eyes. “You haven’t kissed me like that in a long time.”
The colour on Adam’s cheeks had deepened. He kissed Ella again, his hands dropping to her waist. “I have an idea,” he whispered. “Let’s christen this room.”
Ella let out a surprised little laugh. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t feel right.”
Adam lowered his lips to her neck. She squirmed free. He made a playful grab for her and she danced away towards the door. Smiling, he lunged after her. With a squeal of laughter, she ran from the room. He chased her through the opposite doorway into a white marble bathroom with a roll-top bath at its centre. Ella darted around the bath and back into the hallway. Adam pulled up abruptly as he stubbed his foot on one of the bath’s claw feet.
“Oh you’re really for it now,” he grimaced, limping from the bathroom. Ella was nowhere to be seen. The neighbouring door was open. “I’m coming to get you,” he said in a sing-song voice, poking his head into the room. It was unfurnished except for a wall-mounted mirror. The next room was the same. Along with a mirror, the final room on that side of the house had a few items of furniture – single bed, chair, dressing-table, bedside table, wardrobe – all draped in dust sheets. “Ella, where are you?” He peered under the sheets – no Ella. He headed for the other wing of the landing. The furniture in the first four rooms was covered in dust sheets too. He was smiling at first as he lifted the sheets, but then a frown crept in.
“The game’s over,” he called. “Come out.”
No reply.
“I promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
More silence.
The final room was an ostentatious bedroom that extended out from the back of the house with stone-casement windows on three sides. To the north east, Treworder’s white cottages gleamed like jewels. To the south west was a sinuous line of cliffs and coves. A crystal chandelier dangled from the ceiling. A tall fireplace was set between stone pillars with cherubic figures floating up them. A red-silk canopied four-poster bed dominated the room, its corners topped with crucifixes. Adam peered under it. Nothing. His frown intensified.
“This isn’t funny any–” he broke off with a gasp as hands encircled his waist.
Ella dug her fingernails into his flesh. “Did I scare you?”
“No.”
She nuzzled his neck. “Admit it, you were a bit scared.” She started to unbuckle his belt.
“I thought you didn’t feel right about doing anything.”
“I changed my mind.”
Ella turned Adam towards her and pushed him onto the bare mattress. She slid off her jeans and underwear and straddled him. The mattress squeaked as she tilted her hips back and forth. “This bed sounds as old as it looks,” he said.
“Shh,” she murmured, quickening her movements. Her eyelids grew heavy, her soft sighs thickened into husky moans.
Adam bucked against her, his moans mirroring hers as she dropped forwards onto his chest. They held each other silently for a while, then she rose to pull her jeans back on.
“I think that’s what they call a quickie,” said Adam. He breathed deeply. “God, I feel more relaxed than I have done since...” He trailed off, not wanting to say what came next. A yawn pulled at his mouth. “What I’d like to do more than anything now is curl up with you and fall asleep.”
“Mmm, I know what you mean.”
Ella snuggled back into Adam, closing her eyes. Sighing, he shut his eyes too and felt the world drifting away. A delicious blankness settled over him.
A sound like stone grating against stone wormed its way into his consciousness. He opened his eyes slowly, almost warily. A robin was on the windowsill, pecking at something on the stone sill. Adam smiled, shaking his head at himself. What had he expected to see? Winifred Trehearne emerging through a wall?