by Babs Horton
Catrin shivered in the cool air.
Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
Nothing in the kitchen gave a clue to who lived here; it was more like a museum than a real kitchen. It wasn’t likely that she was going to find a telephone here, because everything was ancient.
At the sound of approaching footsteps out in the corridor, she held her breath and clenched her fists tightly at her sides as the kitchen door opened.
Tony Agosti, walking back from the chapel, noticed that the door to the castle was open, and made his way to the kitchen. When he opened the door he jumped with fright at the sight of the girl standing there.
The sunlight streaming through the windows cast a halo round her head and she looked like a figure from a religious painting or a ghost conjured up from another world. He blinked nervously and hurriedly made the sign of the cross.
This was no castle ghost. The girl had a mop of dark curly hair and deep blue eyes which looked too large for her small face, a face as pale as graveyard lilies. She reminded him of one of those incurably sick girls in an old-fashioned novel. She was the skinniest girl he’d ever seen, with legs like cocktail sticks and a skirt which swamped her.
“I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be here,” she said anxiously, taking a hesitant step towards him. “But I was hoping that whoever lives here would let me use the telephone – if they have one, that is.”
“There’s no telephone in here, lovely girl. A couple of carrier pigeons hanging about in the garden, maybe, but nothing as up-to-date as a telephone. There’s no problem your being in here, mind. Mr Gwartney from the library won’t mind one little bit.”
“Does he live here?” she asked.
“No, no one’s lived here for years.”
“But the door was open and there was a key in the lock.”
“Aye, Dan Gwartney is the caretaker of the castle. He keeps an eye on the place, lights the fires now and again to keep the rooms aired. The gardens are always open during the day for people to wander in and take a look round, but hardly any bugger sets foot in Kilvenny now. Gone to the dogs, we have, the last few years.”
“I should like to look round properly but I’m afraid I won’t have time. I’m catching a train soon.”
Tony Agosti looked at her curiously. “That’ll be the ghost train, will it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She eyed him warily. She didn’t like to hear talk of ghosts while she was standing in the cool kitchen alone with a strange man.
“Well, there’s no trains out of Kilvenny now until next week.”
She looked at him with dismay. “But there must be. I arrived here by train yesterday.”
Tony grinned. “That was the late train. Like I said, there’ll be no more trains until next week. Very few people travel here these days, and if they do they don’t tend to stay long.”
Catrin’s face paled.
“I was supposed to be staying at Shrimp’s Hotel for the summer,” she said.
“Were you, by God? No one stays up there any more.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t before I came.” Her voice was impatient.
Tony Agosti thought that the girl was a peculiar little thing, very English and proper, old-fashioned-looking and a bit lah-di-dah in her speech. Little girls of her age didn’t usually travel about the country staying in hotels on their own. Not in Wales, anyhow.
“Shrimp’s has been closed for years,” he said. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
Catrin shook her head and bit her trembling lip.
“Ella Grieve, the owner, shut herself up years ago and never comes out.”
“Does no one ever go there?” Catrin said.
“Not any more. There was a niece who used to stay there – damn, now, she was a beautiful girl, like a film star or a model.”
Catrin bristled. A model for toby jugs, maybe. Why did everyone talk about her mother’s looks and how beautiful she was? They didn’t know her, didn’t know what she was like on the inside. If they did they wouldn’t go on and on about her all the time.
As he stood there looking at this defiant little girl, Tony had a sudden vision of Kizzy Grieve running down the steps to the beach, her long, silky hair streaming behind her.
She had stumbled, lost her shoe and stopped to retrieve it, a shiny black shoe reflecting the last of the sun’s rays. He remembered the golden brown of her slender calf against the hem of her red dress. Her perfume on the warm evening air as she stood looking up at him earnestly, her mascara smudged and her beautiful face stained with recent tears, her mouth opening to speak.
“Beauty isn’t everything, you know,” Catrin snapped.
Tony looked up from his reverie and was taken aback to see the anger in the girl’s face, her eyes bright with fury.
“No, no of course it’s not.”
“Who was she, anyhow?” Catrin asked disingenuously.
“She was called Kizzy. She was Ella’s niece and she used to live here with her mother.”
“Here in Kilvenny?”
“Right here in Kilvenny Castle.”
Catrin looked at him with disbelief. Why hadn’t her mother ever told her this? How was it possible for strangers to know more about her own family than she did? None of it made sense. Kizzy had hardly ever mentioned her parents and never once said that she’d grown up in a castle in Wales.
“When did she stop coming here?”
“Let me see, now. Her mother, Hester, got married again and moved away. Kizzy was sent off to one of those boarding schools, like orphanages for rich people, I always think. She used to come back here in the holidays, though.”
“And stay here in the castle all alone?”
“No. No, she stayed up at Shrimp’s. She found the castle too gloomy for her by half. She liked the home comforts of Shrimp’s – hot water, proper baths, good food and all that.”
Catrin tried to suppress a smile. Kizzy would have hated living in this dark old place with its rickety windows and cold stone floors. Kizzy hated history and all old things; she liked everything to be spanking new and usually expensive.
Catrin thought Kilvenny Castle was beautiful, full of atmosphere and bursting with history.
“And she stopped coming here altogether?”
“She went away one summer and never came back,” he said sadly.
Catrin eyed him suspiciously. He was probably another man who had fallen for her mother’s sickly charms – men never seemed able to see through her.
“Did you go up to Shrimp’s yesterday?” Tony asked with interest.
Catrin nodded.
“Did Ella Grieve let you in?”
“She did, as it happens.”
Tony stared at her with incredulity. “You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I stayed there the night.”
“Are you staying there again tonight?”
“No!”
“So what will you do now?”
“I’m trying to get hold of my school. I’m hoping they’ll send someone down here to pick me up as soon as they can.”
“Is there anyone else you could ring? Your mother, maybe?”
“My mother is away on holiday.”
“I suppose you’d best ring from my place. I’m Tony Agosti, by the way. I keep the Café Romana just over the road.” He held out his hand to her and she shook it shyly.
Her hand was cold, as cold as a corpse.
“Well, come on, then, or my norma will be wondering where I’ve got to.”
“What’s a norma?” Catrin asked.
“The same as a granny, only harder work,” he said with a warm smile.
“I suppose I ought to tell you my name. I’m Catrin Grieve: Ella Grieve is my great-aunt and Kizzy is my mother.”
Tony Agosti stared at her in bewilderment.
Catrin looked back at him, her face draining of all colour as if a vampire had sucked all the blood out of her.
And then she fainted.
&n
bsp; 10
Catrin opened her eyes and blinked in confusion. Above her head a ceiling fan turned slowly, whirring lazily and scattering flies in all directions. There was a smell of strong coffee and warm pastry. She turned her head and realised that she was lying on a red leather banquette from where she could see nothing except table legs. She heaved herself up on her elbows and looked warily around.
She was in the Café Romana opposite Kilvenny Castle, and Tony Agosti was sitting at a table near the window, talking quietly to the old man she’d seen reading in the library last night.
Hell’s teeth. She couldn’t remember walking over here. She must have fainted and been carried. How embarrassing. She lay down again quickly, straining her ears to hear what the two men were saying.
“As I said, Dan, I’d been over to the chapel like I do most days to light some candles for Norma, and I thought p’raps you were in the castle so I went in. There she was, this little girl, standing alone in the kitchen. Gave me a right turn, it did. I thought for a moment that she was a ghost.”
“Plenty of ghosts knocking about over there – bound to be, with the age of the place.”
“We got talking about the old days and then just as I was leaving she said she’s called Catrin Grieve and Ella Grieve is her great-aunt.”
“Well, stone the bloody crows!”
“She says she’s Kizzy Grieve’s daughter.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. What the hell’s she doing here?”
“She said she’d stayed the night up at Shrimp’s and she was waiting to get a train back to London.”
“Bit young, ent she, to be traipsing about the country on her own?”
“That’s what I thought, especially with the look of her – she looks half starved to me.”
“I’ve seen more fat on a kipper.”
“Why the hell would she be staying with Ella? No one in their right mind would stay up there in that dirty hole of a place.”
“They say it’s filthy up there, rats and mice and mouldy food all over the place.”
Tony wrinkled his nose in disgust and Dan went on, “There’s cobwebs as thick as blankets and spiders the size of dinner plates.”
“Ugh. They say she still lays the tables and puts warming pans in the beds as if there were guests staying there.”
Dan nodded. “It’s all very sad. She doesn’t seem to know her arse from her elbow these days, or whether she’s living in the past or the present.”
“Poor Ella was never the same after Alice died,” Tony mused. “It was strange, too, that Kizzy stopped coming.”
“There was a rift of some sort, I gathered, between Kizzy and Ella but God knows what it was all about. The Grieves were always very tight-lipped about their own affairs.”
“I just can’t understand why any mother with her head screwed on the right way would send a child to Shrimp’s, knowing the state it’s in.”
“Hang on a minute, Tony. Did you say she’s called Catrin Grieve?”
“That’s what she said.”
“So she’s taken her mother’s name, not her father’s?”
“So it would seem. Oh, I see what you’re thinking…”
Catrin pulled a face. People always thought the worst, when in fact there was a perfectly reasonable explanation why she had her mother’s maiden name.
“What will happen to her now?”
“Well, the only thing I could do in the circumstances was to ring Ella. Thank God, she actually answered the phone and she’s on her way down here as we speak.”
“You’re joking! You think she’ll really leave Shrimp’s after all this time? It’ll be a turn-up for the books if she does. She hasn’t set foot outside of there since the day they buried poor Alice.”
“She said she’d be here as soon as she could.”
“Well, I’ll be off, then.”
“Why don’t you stay?”
“No, thanks. Ella never could stand the sight of me.”
As he was about to get to his feet a figure passed the café window and the bell above the door tinkled a warning.
Ella stood for some time at the top of the steps, looking down on a deserted Kilvenny beach, trying to gather the courage to make her way across to the village. There, pulled up above the high-water mark, was her old boat, the Dancing Porpoise. It was shabby and rotting, the paint blistered and peeling, and it was certainly no longer seaworthy.
She stepped down on to the beach hesitantly. It was strange to feel the sand and shells beneath her feet again and the sea breeze cool on her sallow skin. She felt as though her blood had thinned during all the years she’d been shut away.
She was fearful of every noise and dreaded bumping into any of the villagers. Already she was contemplating turning tail and fleeing up the steps and back to the safety of Shrimp’s.
She forced herself on, stopping again outside the Fisherman’s Snug.
The old place looked uncared for; the winter storms had taken their toll on the thatched roof. A gull perched defiantly on the chimney, eyeing Ella with suspicion.
By the time she turned into Cockle Lane her legs felt weak with fear and the effort of walking. Once she could have run all the way from Shrimp’s to the far end of the village without drawing breath.
If the news had got out that Ella Grieve had left Shrimp’s, the net curtains would soon start to twitch. The Kilvenny bush telegraph would hum into action. It had never taken long for gossip to get around Kilvenny. It was a miracle that nothing had ever got out about Alice and Kizzy.
She pushed her hair off her face and straightened her back. She was a Grieve and the Grieves were known for their fortitude. Let the nosy buggers get a good look if they liked.
Kilvenny village had changed dramatically since Ella had last set foot there, and she was shocked at how dowdy and run-down everything had become. The once-whitewashed walls of the houses were grimy, and everything looked in urgent need of a lick of paint. A great many of the houses were boarded up and others near to derelict. The Boot Inn was closed, but the cellar flaps were up, waiting for a delivery from the draymen, so there must be customers who still drank there. She wondered if the beer was still brought to Kilvenny by wagons pulled by shire horses.
She caught sight of her reflection in the window of Meredith Evans Photographer’s shop and gasped. She looked bad enough in the mottled hall mirror at Shrimp’s, but out here in the daylight she looked a thousand times worse.
Jesus. She looked like Miss Havisham after a night on the tiles.
There was a sudden movement inside the shop and she looked directly into the face of Meredith Evans. He stared at her, his mouth falling open, bloodshot eyes wide with disbelief. She glowered back at him defiantly; the treacherous little bastard could take a running jump. She sneered at the dusty photographs in the window. It was about time he changed the display in there, it was the same as the last time she’d walked this way more than thirteen years ago.
Further up the road, the house where Mrs Tranter’s Hairdresser’s used to be was boarded up and the curtains in the upstairs windows were rotting where they hung. Mrs Tranter had done a marvellous trade with the villagers and the guests from Shrimp’s. Had she locked herself in and gone to seed as Ella had?
There was a lump in her throat when she saw the Café Romana. When she and Alice were children they had traipsed down here to spend their pocket money. It was a great game of theirs to try and sneak into the café without sounding the bell, so as to surprise Luigi Agosti. No matter how hard they tried, it had always made a noise and he had popped up from behind the counter. He’d been a grand old man and had brought a breath of fresh air into Kilvenny. None of the villagers had ever tasted a sarsaparilla or an ice cream before Luigi came on the scene.
Ella took a deep breath and opened the door. The bell rang out loudly in the silence.
Tony Agosti got to his feet and looked at her, barely able to conceal his shock. It was an age since he’d last clapped eyes on her, and time hadn
’t been kind. She’d never been a fussy dresser in the old days but she’d always looked clean and well turned-out. The clothes she was wearing today would have shamed a bonfire guy, her face was ingrained with years of dirt, and her hair stuck out wildly from her head like grey candyfloss.
Dan Gwartney stood up, glanced at Ella, then cast his eyes down towards the floor. It was hard to look Ella Grieve in the face.
“Hallo, Ella,” Tony said, and there was a quiver of apprehension in his voice. “I’m sorry I had to ring you but I didn’t know what to do for the best with the girl.”
“Where was she when you found her?” Ella enquired.
“Over in the castle. She said she was waiting for a train, but like I told her, there’s only one train a week now.”
“One train a week?” Ella asked suspiciously.
“That’s right,” Tony said sadly.
Dan Gwartney bit his lip. Closing Shrimp’s had been disastrous for Kilvenny, and Ella Grieve alone was responsible for that.
“Thing is, she was talking away to me one minute and then out like a light the next. I couldn’t get an answer from the doctor’s house, otherwise I’d have had him have a look at her so as not to bother you.”
“Where is she now?”
“I put her to lie down over there on the bench. She was sleeping like a baby last time I looked – still is, I fancy.”
Catrin cringed with embarrassment, closed her eyes, feigning sleep in case they came to look at her as she lay there helpless.
“What do you want us to do with her?”
“I don’t want you to do anything with her. I’ll take her back to Shrimp’s, I suppose, get hold of her mother somehow.”
“She is Kizzy’s girl, then?” Dan Gwartney asked, still avoiding Ella’s eye.
She nodded reluctantly.
“You can’t take a child back to that place,” he went on.
She looked fiercely at him, until he blushed crimson and looked away.
“She’s family, and I won’t leave her without a roof over her head.”
“For Christ’s sake, woman, we all know that Shrimp’s is a bloody disgrace. You can’t take a sick child there,” Dan said.