“That’s a very good question,” I said. “I’d love to know the answer.”
• • •
Drew and Teddy had gone. I had no way to reach them. I threw Toby’s few clothes into his empty suitcase, then went into the library and began to pack the instruments into their velvet cases. I put away the heavy galvanoscope carefully, wondering what in the world I would do with it.
Sultana wound around my legs. I would take her, of course; the landlady at my boardinghouse would have a fit, but she would just have to make do. I wasn’t leaving my cat behind for anything. And what about Poseidon? What if William didn’t come home?
I bit my lip and went into the kitchen to get Sultana something to eat, thinking furiously. If I could find Edward Bruton, I could ask him to take care of the dog. And perhaps he had a way to get in touch with Drew. I needed to tell him what I suspected—that somehow the smuggling ring had included looting merchant ships. I wasn’t sure how it could help them, but they had to know. It could be how the codebook had come to light.
And I should talk to Diana Kates. Today was the thirty-first, so at least she’d be glad I was out by month’s end, as I’d promised—though she wasn’t likely to be very happy about the state of the house.
I put down Sultana’s dish and looked around the kitchen for anything I’d forgotten. My eye caught on a book on the windowsill.
I’d completely forgotten about it. It was the book I’d found in the stove on my first day in Rothewell, A History of Incurable Visitations. It was lying on the kitchen windowsill, where I’d last put it when clearing the table for tea.
I picked it up and leafed through the pages. Toby had left this book out for me that first morning, opened. The section about boggarts, I recalled. I turned the pages until I found it.
Though possibly demonic, the account of the grappione at Sénanque also bears resemblance to the traditional Scottish haunt called a boggart, or sometimes bogey, a mischievous—sometimes vicious—manifestation tied to a single place, and often terrifying the inhabitants of the area in which it takes up residence. . . .
And the next page:
For boggarts of particularly vicious temperament and tenacious character, a certain ward or charm can be used for removal. A person who has been born in the place that ties the boggart to it must take six branches of hawthorn, lay them crosswise in the haunted place, and turn his back to it. He then tells the spirit that, as one born in this place, he now asks the spirit to leave, as he has become unwelcome. In some cases, the boggart will appear, but the back must stay turned; it is crucial to the completion of the spell. When the spirit sees that those who inhabit his place have turned their backs on him, he will depart. This charm is thought to originate in Rumania, though it is also known in France, Greece, and Ireland. . . .
I have Vizier’s book here, Toby had written. I will read until I fall asleep.
I made a sound, and Sultana, startled from her supper, glanced up at me. I laughed.
“It’s here,” I said to her, holding up the book. “It’s always been here. Toby showed it to me on the first day, but I didn’t read the other page. Toby tried to tell me from the beginning.” I lowered the book and looked around the empty kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have understood sooner. You wanted to try it, didn’t you? And now you want me to try it.”
I set down the book and thought of the fixed motorcar, the suitcases.
I would leave Rothewell tonight, just as I’d promised. But I had one last thing to do first.
Thirty-two
I found the Kateses’ house rather easily, as it was the next house along the lane. It had an elaborate garden, currently dead, that would be as pretty and as overblown in summer as one of Diana Kates’ hats. The shutters were painted periwinkle blue.
I ducked around the side of the house, trying not to be seen, peeking in the windows one by one. I lucked out at the kitchen, where I spotted Julia slicing apples next to a large woman who was obviously the cook. When the cook left the room, I tossed pebbles at the window and waited.
Julia’s plain face appeared soon enough, and her jaw dropped when she saw me. She stood still in the window in indecision, then disappeared.
A moment later she was at the back door. “What are you doing here?” she whispered in a high-pitched hiss that could have been heard at the neighbors’.
“I need your help with something,” I said.
“Mother will see!”
“Hush—I don’t want her to know. I don’t want this all over town.”
She glanced behind her, then drew closer to me, lowering her voice. “What is it?”
“Just read this and see.”
I handed her the book, open to the page about boggarts. Her brow furrowed as she began to read. As she finished, her expression tightened, her skin paling. She looked up at me.
“You said you wanted to fix this place,” I said. “You asked my uncle to do it. Well, this was what he found, only he never lived long enough to try it. Why don’t we try it? You and I.”
“But it’s just an old folktale,” she argued.
“It may be. How are we to know if we don’t try?”
Wariness flashed across her face, as if she thought perhaps I was duping her. “I’d get in trouble.”
“That’s why you must sneak away. When do you think your mother wouldn’t notice?”
“I don’t know. She always takes a nap after supper. Five o’clock or so.” Now she was calculating. “She closes her door and sleeps like the dead, and the cook goes home.” She looked up at me, uncertainty in her eyes again, and the pain of deep shyness. “I’ll be afraid,” she said.
“So will I,” I told her. “I’m completely terrified, in fact—too terrified to do it alone. But it will be less frightening, don’t you think, with the two of us?”
“It isn’t just that. You need to have me with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The charm.” She nodded toward the book. “It says you have to have someone who was born here. I know I was. So that’s me.”
I nodded. “Yes. That’s you. It’s up to you, Julia.”
She bit her lip, and then the corner of her mouth quirked just a little in a trace of a mischievous smile. “Tonight?”
I smiled back. “Tonight. Where shall we meet? In the woods?”
“I don’t go in the woods at night. No one does.”
“Julia, I have only one chance at this. It says we have to go to the haunted place. It’s almost All Souls’ night. He’ll be there.”
Her eyes were wide, but she nodded. “I’m not going alone. We’ll meet at a landmark and go down to the beach together. How about the signal house?”
“All right, but I don’t know how to get to it.”
“There’s a shortcut. You go north instead of along the main path down to the bay. The turnoff’s just behind William Moorcock’s house. There’s a track through the trees. It’s less used than the other, but it’s there.” Behind her, a voice came from the hall, calling her name. “I have to go.”
“Five o’clock?” I said. “Before it gets dark.”
This time she smiled. “Five o’clock.”
I melted back into the garden, behind a tinkling cherub water fountain and its seashell pool, and waited until Julia closed the door. Then I slipped through the back gate and away down the path by the trees.
• • •
I had no idea whether the spell would work. It was an old folktale found in a book. But I had seen firsthand that old folktales were not always what they seemed. I was glad I’d enlisted Julia, because I truly was afraid. But still, it felt rather good to have a plan.
The postmistress, Mrs. Trowbridge, led me to the village’s only telephone, which was placed in a tiny booth in the post office, with a folding door considerately placed for privacy. “Take y
our time,” she told me with a smile. “We don’t put much stock by telephones here, so I barely get one person in a day.”
I looked at her for a long moment. She had known Elizabeth Price and had cared for her. But no. I wasn’t ready, not yet. “Thank you.”
I had the operator connect me to Scotland Yard. I told the person who answered that I needed to get a message to Inspector Merriken; I was patched through to one person, and then another, and then another, then mistakenly disconnected. I rang through again and finally reached someone who told me that he wasn’t entirely certain of where Inspector Merriken was, or whether a message could be gotten to him, but if I told him my message, he was game to take it down. I told him that I had information about the book and that I needed to speak to the inspector as soon as I could. I told him I’d be in Barnstaple in the morning and named the inn I’d stayed in before. I’d wait there for the inspector’s call.
The man repeated it back to me, and rang off. Next I rang the White Lion Inn in St. Thomas’ Gate on the chance that the inspectors hadn’t yet left, but Mrs. Ebury—disgusted, of course, at yet another girl phoning for the popular Inspector Merriken—said they’d gone more than an hour ago. I sat in the telephone booth, staring at the receiver, wondering where else I could call to find him. I could come up with nothing.
I thought perhaps I’d leave then, nod to Mrs. Trowbridge, walk out the door, and keep going down the street. I saw all of that in my mind, but what happened was I picked up the receiver again and had the operator put me through to London—to the Savoy Hotel.
The front desk man confirmed that yes, Professor and Mrs. Leigh were staying there, and he’d put me through to their room right away. I listened to the clicks on the line, my heart in my chest, waiting for the voice to come on the other end.
It was my mother—my adopted mother, that was. “Darling!” she said. She sounded happy, but I thought I detected a high note of strain in her voice. “We’re only here for such a whirlwind stay. It came up so quickly, and we knew you weren’t at school. However did you find us?”
“Mr. Reed told me,” I said.
There was a pause. “I see. So you’ve spoken to him, then?”
“Yes,” I said, and suddenly I was tired. “I know everything now, Mother. I know.”
The line crackled in the silence, and then I could hear the distinctive sound of my mother lighting a cigarette and slowly inhaling. “Well. You’ve been thrown for a loop, I’m sure. It was best, darling.”
“What was best?” I asked. “Lying to me about my parentage, or keeping Toby away from me?”
“Both of them, actually. That girl was practically a child. And Toby—well, you know how Toby was.”
“I don’t,” I said, unable to hide the bitterness in my voice. “I don’t know how he was at all. Perhaps you could tell me.”
She took another drag on the cigarette. She was keeping her voice carefully controlled, but my mother never smoked quickly unless she was quite upset. I knew her so very well. “Difficult,” she said finally. “He was younger than your father, and quieter, but he was just as stubborn. We could never talk him out of ghost hunting—God, how we tried! We were at him for years. Charles said he’d get him a job at a bank or an insurance company, use his connections. A stable job that would make money. Toby would just nod politely and go his own way. What do you do with someone who actually believes in what he’s doing?”
“Perhaps it was true,” I said softly. “All the things he saw.”
“Please don’t say that, dear. He lived his entire life under that delusion. He couldn’t possibly have raised a child. We were going to tell you everything; I promise.”
“For God’s sake, when?”
“Soon. Very soon. We should have known you’d find out if you went to Rothewell, if you talked to Mr. Reed. But Toby’s death was so unexpected, and we were caught in Paris, and it’s been incredibly busy, and we couldn’t leave. You understand, don’t you, darling?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose hard right between my eyes. “Mother, he was murdered.”
“What?”
“It’s true.”
“That’s madness. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill Toby.” Another pause, this one worried. “My God, I’ll have to tell Charles.”
“Is he there?”
“No, he went out to get a new tie; the one he has got ruined. He’s taken Toby’s death very hard, darling, harder than you’d think. This will only make it worse.”
“If he’s taken it so hard, why am I here alone? I had to identify his body, Mother.”
“All right,” she said slowly. “Yes, I’ll admit we deserved that. We weren’t thinking, I suppose. Your father . . . Charles wouldn’t even hear of going home. I don’t think your father quite understood how Toby’s death would affect him. It’s been hitting him slowly. And, God, he has a lecture tonight. What should I do?”
“Mother, listen.” I recognized the tone of my own voice from long years of calming down my mother. “You have to tell him. Just tell him that it’s an open case, and Scotland Yard is investigating. I’ll update both of you as soon as I can.”
“You’re angry; I can tell. Darling, please don’t be angry. And there’s something else going on. What is it?”
There’s a ghost, and Toby is haunting my boardinghouse, and someone tried to kill me. Toby was murdered over a treasonous plot, the Germans want to sink our merchant ships and we’re trying to stop them, and I think I may have fallen in love with the police inspector who came to my house and took me to bed. . . .
“I’m handling it,” I said. “I am.”
“Of course you are.” And I knew, with a sudden flash of perfect clarity, that she hadn’t wanted to know. “I know you’re angry with us. I do. And I’ll admit that cutting Toby out of our lives was rather a mistake—that was your father’s doing, I’m afraid. But Jillian, you were fourteen, and he came to take you back. You’ll understand when you have children, but you’re my daughter.” A fierceness had crept into her voice that I recognized as the product of genuine anger. “You’re my daughter, and anyone who wanted to take you would have had to kill me first. If you want a mea culpa, I can give you one. But I won’t apologize for that. I won’t.”
The operator cut in and warned us that we were nearly out of time. When we were connected again, my mother had lit another cigarette. “All right, then,” she said, her voice brittle. “We haven’t much longer, and Charles and I are in London for only few more hours—we leave for Paris just after midnight. So I suppose we have to leave it.” She exhaled. “Just tell me one thing, please, before you go. Tell me you forgive me.”
I closed my eyes. I thought of Toby, of all the opportunities I’d missed, the chance to know him, to see whether he was like me. “I want to,” I said honestly, “but I don’t think I can. Not now. I just don’t think I can do it.”
“Darling.” Her voice, even with the brittleness, even through the crackling line, was classic Nora Leigh—charming, magnetic, confident, and utterly without fear. “You are my daughter. I raised you from the day you were born. I gave you everything that was the best in me, and I know you better than you know yourself. The one thing I know is that you can do anything.”
And before I could answer, the line went dead.
• • •
Rachel’s store was still closed, so I went ’round the building to the back door. I found her sitting at her father’s bedside. She had stopped reading and was now only sitting, his hand in hers, her eyes hollow. It looked to be the last vigil George York would ever need.
“Go rest,” I told her gently. “I’ll sit by him for a while.”
The smile that illuminated her features nearly broke my heart. “Would you? Do you mean it? I have Sam back, but he’s upstairs alone. I don’t want him here for this.”
“Yes, of course. Go see to him. A
nd get some sleep.”
“It’s just for a while.”
“I know.”
She stood. “Jillian, you’re a good friend.”
She moved to the door, but before she was gone I asked her one more question. “Rachel?”
“Yes?”
“Your father’s boat. Who has used it since he got sick?”
She looked puzzled. “No one.”
“No one at all?”
“No.”
“Has anyone been on the boat? For any other reason?”
She thought about it. “Just William. I told him I was going to sell the boat, and he helped me. He went through it top to bottom to get it ready to sell.” She shrugged. “He’s the only one. Does that help?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll call you if anything happens. Now go.”
She went, and I took her place in the bedside chair, the old man’s hands in mine. He moved restlessly, and his eyes opened. “Elizabeth.”
I turned to him, and this time I smiled. “Yes, it’s me.”
“I’m so glad you’ve come. . . .”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve come.” I leaned closer to the bed. “I hear you have something to tell me.”
Thirty-three
It grew dark early this time of year, and the faded sunlight had begun to vanish into twilight. The clouds were so low they seemed to scrape the rooftops, and there was moisture in the chill wind. I stepped out of Barrow House and watched the trees bow.
I hurried down the lane, tying the belt of my coat tightly around my waist, pulling the collar up to my chin. I hadn’t bothered with a hat and gloves, and I wore my sturdiest low-heeled shoes. In my pocket I carried the second torch, which had suddenly reappeared in its case, just where it should be. I couldn’t think of what else I would need to go ghost hunting.
I stopped first at William’s house and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I could hear Poseidon inside, restless and whining. The inspectors had left the door unlocked—almost no one locked their doors in Rothewell, it seemed—so I entered the quiet house to let the dog out. While Poseidon was in the yard I rifled through William’s cupboards to find the dog’s food. When Poseidon whined to come in again, I fed him and sat at the kitchen table, watching him eat, feeling uneasy and out of place in the silence. It was as if William had gone on a trip and asked me to watch his dog—that quiet emptiness and unaccustomed smell of a house waiting for its owner to return. I wondered whether William were hurt, or dead. Perhaps even now he was lying somewhere, where no one would find him.
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