by Kate Morton
Eliza blinked at her as one might a curious, foreign animal in the London zoo, then nodded.
Another set of footsteps in the hall and Rose was granted brief respite from the challenge of summoning up further pleasantries to converse with this strange, silent cousin.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, my Lady,’ came Mrs Hopkins’s voice from the door, ‘only Dr Matthews is downstairs in the morning room. He says he’s brought the new tincture you were asking after.’
‘Have him leave it for me, Mrs Hopkins. I have other business to attend to at present.’
‘Of course, my Lady, and I suggested as much to Dr Matthews, but he was most definite about giving it to you himself.’
Mamma’s eyelashes performed the slightest of flutters, so subtle that only one whose life’s work had involved observation of her moods would have noticed. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hopkins,’ she said grimly. ‘Advise Dr Matthews that I will be down directly.’
As Mrs Hopkins’s footsteps disappeared down the hallway, Mamma turned to the cousin and said, in a clear, authoritative voice: ‘You will sit silently on the rug and listen carefully as Rose instructs you. Do not move. Do not speak. Do not touch a thing.’
‘But Mamma—’ Rose had not expected to be left alone so soon.
‘Perhaps you will begin your lessons by giving your cousin some guidance as to proper dress.’
‘Yes, Mamma.’
And then the billowing blue skirts were receding again, the door was closed and the room’s fire ceased spitting. Rose met the cousin’s gaze. They were alone together and the work would begin.
‘Put that down. Put it down at once.’ Things were not going at all as Rose had imagined. The girl would not listen, would not obey, did not fall into line even when Rose raised the threat of Mamma’s wrath. For five whole minutes now Eliza had been wandering around the nursery, picking things up, inspecting them, putting them down again. No doubt leaving sticky fingerprints everywhere. At this moment she was shaking the kaleidoscope that some great aunt or another had sent for Rose’s birthday one year. ‘That’s precious,’ Rose said sourly. ‘I insist that you leave it. You’re not even doing it right.’
Too late, Rose realised she had said the wrong thing. Now the cousin was coming towards her, holding out the kaleidoscope. Coming so close Rose could glimpse the dirt beneath her fingernails, the dreaded dirt that Mamma promised would make her ill.
Rose was horrified. She shrank back against her chair, head spinning. ‘No,’ she managed to say, ‘shoo. Get away.’
Eliza stopped at the arm of the chair, seemed about to perch herself right there on the velvet.
‘Get away, I said!’ Rose flapped a pale, weak hand. Did it not understand the Queen’s English? ‘You mustn’t sit right by me.’
‘Why not?’
So it did have words. ‘You’ve been outside. You’re not clean. I could catch something.’ Rose collapsed back against the cushion. ‘I’m awfully dizzy now, and it’s all your fault.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ said Eliza plainly. Not even the tiniest note of proper supplication. ‘I’m dizzy too. It’s because this room’s as hot as a furnace.’
She dizzy too? Rose was speechless. Dizziness was her own special weapon to deploy. And what was the cousin doing now? She was on her feet again, moving towards the nursery window. Rose watched, eyes wide with fear. Surely she didn’t intend to—
‘I’ll just get this open.’ Eliza jiggled the first lock loose. ‘Then we’ll be right.’
‘No.’ Rose felt terror surge within her. ‘No!’
‘You’ll feel much better.’
‘But it’s winter. It’s come over all dark and cloudy outside. I might catch a chill.’
Eliza shrugged. ‘You might not.’
Rose was so shocked by the girl’s cheek that indignation outweighed fear. She adopted Mamma’s voice. ‘I demand that you stop.’
Eliza wrinkled her nose, seemed to be digesting this instruction. As Rose held her breath, the cousin’s hands dropped from the window lock. She shrugged again, but the gesture was somehow less impertinent this time. As she wandered back towards the centre of the room, Rose thought she detected a pleasing despondence in the set of Eliza’s shoulders. Finally, the girl stopped in the centre of the rug and pointed to the cylinder in Rose’s lap. ‘Can you show me how it works? The telescope? I couldn’t see through it.’
Rose exhaled, weary, relieved and increasingly confused by this strange creature. Really, to have turned her attention back to the silly trinket again, just like that! Still, the cousin had been obedient and surely that deserved some small encouragement . . . ‘First of all,’ she said primly, ‘it’s not a telescope at all. It’s a kaleidoscope. You’re not supposed to see through it. You look inside and the pattern changes.’ She held it up and performed the action before laying the toy on the floor and rolling it towards her cousin.
Eliza picked it up and put it to her eye, turned the end. As the pieces of coloured glass rattled this way and that, her mouth spread into a wide smile, which broadened until she was laughing.
Rose blinked with surprise. She hadn’t heard much laughter before, only the servants occasionally when they thought she wasn’t near. The sound was lovely. A happy, light, girlish sound, quite at odds with her cousin’s appearance.
‘Why do you wear those clothes?’ said Rose.
Eliza continued to peer through the kaleidoscope. ‘Because they’re mine,’ she said eventually. ‘They belong to me.’
‘They look as if they belong to a boy.’
‘Once upon a time they did. Now they’re mine.’
This was a surprise. Things were becoming more curious with each passing minute. ‘Which boy?’
There came no answer, just the jiggling of the kaleidoscope.
‘I said, which boy?’ A little louder this time.
Slowly, Eliza lowered the toy.
‘It’s very bad manners to ignore people, you know.’
‘I’m not ignoring you,’ said Eliza.
‘Then why don’t you answer?’
Another shrug.
‘It’s rude to lift your shoulders like that. When someone speaks to you, you must provide them with an answer. Now tell me, why were you ignoring my question?’
Eliza looked up and stared at her. As Rose watched, something seemed to change in her cousin’s face. A light that hadn’t been there before seemed now to glow behind her eyes. ‘I didn’t speak, because I didn’t want her to know where I was.’
‘Her who?’
Carefully, slowly, Eliza came a little closer. ‘The Other Cousin.’
‘What other cousin?’ Really the girl spoke no sense. Rose was beginning to think she truly was simple. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘There is no other cousin.’
‘She’s a secret. They keep her locked upstairs.’
‘You’re making it up. Why would anyone keep her a secret?’
‘They kept me a secret, didn’t they?’
‘They didn’t keep you locked upstairs.’
‘That’s because I wasn’t dangerous.’ Eliza tiptoed to the nursery door, prised it open a crack and peered outside. She gasped.
‘What?’ said Rose.
‘Shh!’ Eliza held a finger to her lips. ‘We can’t let her know we’re in here.’
‘Why?’ Rose’s eyes were wide.
Eliza tiptoed back to the edge of Rose’s chair. The flickering firelight in the darkening room gave her face an eerie glow. ‘Our Other Cousin,’ she said, ‘is insane.’
‘Mad?’
‘As a hatter.’ Eliza lowered her voice so that Rose had to lean close to hear. ‘She’s been locked in the attic since she was small, but someone’s let her out.’
‘Who?’
‘One of the ghosts. The ghost of an old woman, a very fat old woman.’
‘Grandmamma,’ whispered Rose.
‘Shh!’ said Eliza. ‘Listen! Footsteps.’
Ros
e could feel her poor feeble heart leaping like a frog in her chest.
Eliza jumped onto the arm of Rose’s chair. ‘She’s coming!’
The door opened and Rose screamed. Eliza grinned and Mamma gasped.
‘What are you doing up there, wicked girl?’ she hissed, gaze flitting from Eliza to Rose. ‘Young ladies do not sit astride the furniture. You were told not to move.’ Her breathing was loud. ‘Are you harmed, my Rose?’
Rose shook her head. ‘No, Mamma.’
For just an instant, Mamma seemed at a rare loss; Rose almost feared that she might cry. Then she seized Eliza by the upper arm and marched her towards the door. ‘Wicked girl! You’ll have no supper tonight.’ A familiar steel had returned to her voice. ‘And no supper any night thereafter. Not until you learn to do as you are told. I am mistress of this house and you will obey me . . .’
The door closed and Rose sat alone once more. Wondering at this peculiar turn of events. The thrill of Eliza’s story, the curious enjoyable fear that had stalked up her spine, the terrible, wonderful spectre of the mad Other Cousin. But it was the crack that had appeared in Mamma’s usually cast-iron composure that intrigued Rose most of all. For in that moment, the stable borders of Rose’s world had seemed to shift.
All was not as it had been. And that knowledge made Rose’s heart thump—strongly now—with unexpected, unexplained, unadulterated joy.
29
The Blackhurst Hotel, 2005
The colours were different here. Cassandra had never realised how sharp the Australian glare was until she met the gentle Cornish light. She wondered how she’d go about replicating it in watercolours, surprised herself for having wondered. She took a bite of buttery toast and chewed thoughtfully, looked at the line of trees that stood on the cliff edge. Closing one eye, she lifted her index finger to trace along their tops.
A shadow fell across her table and there was a voice right beside her. ‘Cassandra? Cassandra Ryan?’ A woman in her early sixties was standing by the table, silver-blonde and shapely, with eye makeup whose application had left no corner of the shadow compact unexplored. ‘I’m Julia Bennett, I own the Blackhurst Hotel.’
Cassandra wiped a buttery finger on her napkin and shook hands. ‘Nice to meet you.’
Julia indicated the vacant chair. ‘Mind if I . . . ?’
‘Of course not, please.’
Julia sat down and Cassandra waited uncertainly, wondering whether this was part of the personalised service threatened in the brochure.
‘I hope you’re enjoying your stay with us.’
‘It’s a lovely spot.’
Julia looked at her and smiled so that dimples appeared in each cheek. ‘You know, I can see your grandmother in you. But I bet you hear that all the time.’
Behind Cassandra’s polite smile, a flock of questions resisted shepherding. How did this stranger know who she was? How did she know Nell? How had she put the two of them together?
Julia laughed and leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘A little birdie told me the Australian girl who’d inherited the cottage was in town. Tregenna is a small place, you sneeze on the Sharpstone cliff and the fellows in the harbour know all about it.’
Cassandra realised who the bird in question was. ‘Robyn Jameson.’
‘She was here yesterday, trying to enlist me for the festival committee,’ said Julia. ‘Couldn’t resist imparting the local comings and goings while she was at it. I put two and two together and connected you with the lady who came to call some thirty years ago, saved my skin by taking the cottage off my hands. I always wondered when your grandmother would return, kept an eye out for her for some time. I liked her. She was a straight shooter, wasn’t she?’
The description was so accurate that Cassandra couldn’t help wondering what Nell had said or done to earn it.
‘You know, the first time I met your grandmother, she was hanging from a rather thick wisteria near the front entrance.’
‘Really?’ Cassandra’s eyes widened.
‘She’d scaled the front wall and was having difficulty getting down on the other side. Lucky for her I’d just had an argument with my husband Richard, number ninety-seven for the day, and I was stalking around the grounds trying to cool down. I hate to think how long she’d have been hanging there otherwise.’
‘She was trying to see the house?’
Julia nodded. ‘Said she was an antiques dealer interested in Victoriana and wondered if she could take a peek inside.’
Cassandra felt a fierce flame of affection for Nell as she imagined her scaling walls and telling half-truths, refusing to take no for an answer.
‘I told her she was welcome to come in, just as soon as she’d finished swinging from my creepers!’ Julia laughed. ‘The house was in pretty poor condition, it’d been roundly neglected for decades by then, and Rick and I had dismantled things to the point that they looked far worse than they had done to begin with, but she didn’t seem to mind. She walked through, stopping at each and every room. It was like she was trying to commit them to memory.’
Or retrieve them from memory. Cassandra wondered how much Nell had told Julia about the reason for her interest. ‘Did you show her the cottage too?’
‘No, but I sure as hell mentioned it to her. Then I crossed my fingers and everything else I could manage to cross.’ She laughed. ‘We were that desperate for a buyer! We were going broke just as surely as if we’d dug a hole beneath the house and tossed every last pound into it. We’d had the cottage on the market for a while, you see. Almost sold it twice to Londoners looking for a holiday home, but both contracts fell through. Rotten luck. We dropped the price but there was no way we could get a local to buy it, not for love nor money. Spectacular views and no one interested because of some silly old rumours.’
‘Robyn told me.’
‘As far as I can see, there’s something wrong with your house in Cornwall if it isn’t haunted,’ said Julia lightly. ‘We’ve got our very own ghost at the hotel. But you already know that, I hear you met her the other night?’
Cassandra’s puzzlement must have shown on her face, for Julia continued, ‘Samantha on the front desk told me you reported a key in your door?’
‘Oh,’ said Cassandra, ‘yeah. I thought it was another guest, but it must’ve been the wind. I didn’t mean to cause any—’
‘That’s her all right, that’s our ghost.’ Julia laughed at Cassandra’s expression of perplexity. ‘Oh, now, don’t you be alarmed, she won’t do you any harm. She’s not an unfriendly ghost exactly. I wouldn’t keep an unfriendly ghost.’
Cassandra had the feeling that Julia was pulling her leg. All the same, she’d heard more talk of ghosts since she’d arrived in Cornwall than she had since she was twelve years old and went to her first slumber party. ‘I suppose every old house needs one,’ she ventured.
‘Precisely,’ said Julia. ‘People expect it. I’d have had to invent one if there hadn’t been one here already. An historic hotel like this . . . Why, a resident ghost is as important to guests as clean towels.’ She leaned forward. ‘Ours even has a name. Rose Mountrachet: she and her family used to live here, back at the start of the twentieth century. Well, before that if you consider the family went back hundreds of years. That’s her in the picture hanging by the bookcase in the foyer, the young woman with pale skin and dark hair. Have you seen it?’
Cassandra shook her head.
‘Oh, you must,’ said Julia. ‘It’s a John Singer Sargent, painted a few years after he did the Wyndham sisters.’
‘Really?’ Cassandra’s skin cooled. ‘An actual John Singer Sargent?’
Julia laughed. ‘Incredible, isn’t it? Another of the house’s secrets. I didn’t realise its value myself until a few years ago. We had a fellow out from Christie’s to look at another painting and he spotted it. I call it my nest egg, not that I could ever bear to part with it. Such a beauty was our Rose, and such a tragic life! A delicate child who overcame ill health only to die at twenty
-four in a dreadful accident.’ She sighed romantically. ‘Have you finished your breakfast? Come with me and I’ll show you the painting.’
Rose Mountrachet at eighteen was fair indeed: white skin, a cloud of dark hair swept back in a loose braid, and the full bosom so fashionable in the period. Sargent was renowned for his ability to discern and capture the personality of his sitters, and Rose’s gaze was soulful. Red lips relaxed in repose but eyes that remained watchful, fixed on the artist. It was a seriousness of expression that fitted with what Cassandra imagined of a girl who’d spent her entire childhood imprisoned by ill health.
She leaned closer. The portrait’s composition was interesting. Rose was seated on a sofa, a book in her lap. The sofa was angled away from the frame so that Rose was in the right-hand foreground and behind her was a wall papered in green but with little other detail. The way the wall was rendered gave it a sense of being pale and feathery, more impressionistic than the realism for which Sargent was known. It was not unheard of for Sargent to use such techniques, but this seemed somehow lighter than his other work, less careful.
‘She was a beauty, wasn’t she?’ said Julia, sashaying over from the reception desk.
Cassandra nodded distractedly. The date on the painting was 1907, not long before he swore off portraiture. Perhaps he had been growing tired of rendering the faces of the wealthy even then.
‘I see she’s worked her spell on you. Now you know why I was so keen to enlist her as our ghost.’ She laughed, then noticed Cassandra hadn’t. ‘Are you all right? You look a little peaky. Glass of water?’
Cassandra shook her head. ‘No, no, I’m fine thanks. It’s just the painting . . .’ She pressed her lips together, heard herself say, ‘Rose Mountrachet was my great-grandmother.’
Julia’s eyebrows leapt.
‘I only found out recently.’ Cassandra smiled at Julia, embarrassed. No matter that it was the truth, she felt like an actor speaking soap opera lines, bad soap opera lines. ‘I’m sorry. This is the first time I’ve seen a picture of her. It all feels very real suddenly.’