by Jane Godman
“Now, miss, you don’t want to worry yourself about Miss Ceri here, she’s a picky eater and nothing will please her when she’s in this mood. Besides,” she added with a grim smile, “I’ve no time to make anything else, so much as I have to do today.” She sighed in the manner of one whose work is never done.
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to cook my breakfast for me, Mrs. Price,” I reassured her calmly. “I’ll make myself an omelette and one for Ceri here at the same time. So I’ll not keep you from your other tasks.” Her eyes flashed angrily, and with a great deal of huffing, she pointed out where everything was and left us.
Ceri regarded me with round-eyed respect. “She doesn’t like leaving the kitchen.” She jumped up to help me find a pan.
“How on earth does she do the cleaning?” I asked, breaking eggs into a bowl.
“Oh, she doesn’t. Gwladys does that,” Ceri said cheerfully.
I pursed my lips and kept my uncharitable thoughts to myself as I whisked the eggs. “Should we make some for your uncle?” I wondered.
“Uncle Gethin never eats breakfast. He says it is contrary to the laws of nature.” She surreptitiously slid her bread and butter into the bin and came to watch me as I cooked the eggs. “When he’s here, he gets up early and goes for a walk and then works in his study until lunchtime.” Daintily she tried a tiny piece of the omelette I placed before her. Pronouncing it acceptable, she proceeded to eat the lot. When we had finished, she obligingly helped me to wash the dishes.
I dried my hands on a greying dishtowel. “Later this morning we will work out our daily timetable, and tomorrow we’ll begin our lessons properly. But for now, you can show me around the house.”
Chapter Four
Ceri led me on a whirlwind tour. I counted twelve bedrooms, most of which were not in use at all. The stale scent of age and mysterious shapes shrouded in protective covers held a promise of exploration to be savoured another day. My room, I learned, was directly below the clock tower, the door to which remained firmly locked at all times. Ceri said her uncle had warned her against going up there, explaining that the spiral staircase that led to the top was dangerous and in need of repair. If you applied that principle to the whole house, I thought grimly, we’d be locked out of every room.
Downstairs the faded beauty of the family rooms was even more melancholy in daylight. A huge dining room, with oak panels that covered both floor and ceiling, housed a table fit for a king’s banquet. But the damask velvet embroidery on the chair seats was threadbare, and the stained-glass panels on the windows had been dulled by years of grime. Several elegant salons led one from the other, and Ceri called them by the long-ago colours of their furnishings. “The green salon, the blue parlour, the crimson drawing room…” She rattled off the names as I dutifully admired the immense proportions of each. And all the while, the mouldering grandeur and wasted beauty tugged the barometer of my spirits lower.
“The house was built a hundred years ago by my great-grandfather, Dyffed Taran.” Gethin emerged from the study and joined us. I sensed Ceri draw slightly closer to me. “There was an older house here, an Elizabethan manor, with parts that dated back even further. But it was destroyed by fire. Hence the rebuilding project.” We stepped outside, and I dutifully followed his gaze up at the imposing facade. “Prior to the fire, the old house had been plagued by stories of ghosts and spirits, and before the first stones for the new house were laid, Dyffed was determined to rid the site of this supernatural plague. A veritable army of clergymen were brought in to remove the various entities which laid claim to the place.” His tone was light. “Stories abound of the battles that raged between the forces of good and evil. The exorcists apparently emerged successful, up to a point. The shades that once inhabited the house were driven up onto the mountains and were promptly captured by the wild huntsmen of the higher ridges. They are said to be imprisoned within what are now known as the Taran lights.” I gave a little start of surprise, but he didn’t appear to notice. A glance down at Ceri’s face showed me a troubled expression descending over her delicate features.
“It’s not very…” I paused, tactfully searching for a word that was not too damning. That was difficult. What I wanted to say was that the whole atmosphere of the house was as rank as the breath of a demon. I compromised. “Welcoming, is it?” I asked, and Gethin laughed.
“It’s one of those places.” His gaze softened. “You either love it or loathe it. But if you love it, it holds on to your heart with ferocious tenacity.”
He seemed rather embarrassed that he had allowed me such a poetic glimpse of his feelings, and excusing himself, he left Ceri to finish showing me around.
The wings I had spied from the road were the stable block on one side and outhouses on the other. Both were almost completely ruined now. The imposing clock tower must, I decided, have spectacular views across the whole valley, particularly of the rocky cirque known as the chair. There was an identical clock face on all four sides of the square tower, each, sadly, showing a different time. None of the decorative hands indicated the right time. On either side of each clock there was a long, narrow strip of lead-trimmed window. Three of these were broken, and I suspected this fact, in addition to the damaged staircase, might be the reason for the locked door. A fall from that height would mean certain death. The cupola was of beaten green copper, and an ornate ironwork filigree of vines and leaves wound its way around the whole structure. It was a beautiful, whimsical feature. But looking at it made me feel curiously uneasy.
* * *
“You’d not catch me spending a night in this valley, miss! Not for all the tea in China! That’s for certain sure.” Gwladys shuddered as we gazed down the sleepy dale. She was a moon-faced girl with an eager-to-please manner that was directly at odds with Mrs. Price’s unfriendly approach. In daylight, her words had the power to surprise me. My second day at Taran House was bright with dewy promise. Last year’s leaves still lay like golden feathers scattered on carpets of emerald. Nature was investing all her wealth in a jewelled spring, turning the secretive vale into an enchanted grotto. Tree-lined labyrinths and faerie glens glistened with morning diamonds, birds floated home on gentle breezes and shy, droop-headed flowers nodded their approval.
Behind us the house slumbered in its tired grandeur. By the light of day it had more decaying beauty than nighttime’s doomed promise. Poppies had claimed the yellowed lawn like splatters of scarlet paint flung onto an aging canvas. Daisies peeped their shy faces between them. Ivy sneaked surreptitious fingers along the lower floors, and house sparrows had claimed the eaves for their new nests. Nature was staging a stealthy coup, and the house was putting up only a token resistance.
“It’s an evil place.” Gwladys’s whisper drew my attention back to her. I raised my brows, and taking this as a sign of encouragement, she nodded sagely. “The whole valley is haunted.” My thoughts turned unbidden to the pearly lights and spectral shades I had seen. “At times, so it’s said, the spectres and hounds that guard the pit of hell spill over from their world to ours and come to claim new flesh!” I shivered slightly, a reaction that seemed to please Gwladys greatly. Warming to her role as teller of ghostly tales, she continued in hushed tones. “There are phantom lights—will-o’-the-wisps—that dance up there on Taran’s great chair, and the spirits of the undead are trapped within them.”
“But they are just the Northern Lights—the aurora borealis—nothing ghostly about them, Gwladys,” I assured her.
She gave me a pitying glance. “Oh, no, miss! Them aurory things, they are quite different. Our lights, the Taran lights, they are the huntsmen who ride across the night sky with their horses and hounds to seek out the souls of the newly dead. Those they find are captured and doomed to a living death. Anyone may see the lights, but only some see the wild spirits within them.” I don’t know why, but I chose not to mention that I had already been one of the few. “Them that has t
he eye,” she finished grandly.
“The eye?” Really, it was just too nonsensical for words to allow myself to be spooked by this silly, superstitious girl!
“You know, miss, the eye into another world, the world of those who have passed over. My mam says the veil between their realm and ours is a thin one, and some people can see through it, while others can’t.”
“What about you, Gwladys? Can you see through the veil?”
She gave a little squeak of horror. “Lord bless us! No, miss! Nor would I want to! It’s a gift and a curse, that’s for sure. And the spirits caught in the Taran lights, well, they are seen—can even, it is said, be summoned—by two different types. Those who are pure and will bring only good to the valley and those”—she cast a furtive look over her shoulder—“who are evil in both thought and deed.”
I looked back at the house. The clouds covered the sun now, changing the valley so that it became a shadowed, forbidden hollow. Taran House awoke and brooded in its mountainous lair. As I cast a doubtful eye over its once-again grim features, Gethin stepped out of the front door. He didn’t see us. Pausing, he lit a cigarette before sliding behind the wheel of his car. For some reason, my eyes were drawn from him and upward to the dark, watchful windows of the clock tower. The mood, that mere minutes ago had been benign, changed in that instant to one of malevolence. Admonishing myself for allowing Gwladys’s fanciful chatter to affect me so profoundly, I made my way back to the house to prepare for Ceri’s first full day of lessons.
It was later that day that the first near miss happened. Ceri asked if we could play hopscotch after lunch, so I had chalked out a grid on the paved path that flanked the house. We took turns to throw our stones and hop or jump along the grid. One minute Ceri was chastising me noisily for the wild inaccuracy of my throws. The next—looking back, I’m not quite sure what we were doing, perhaps retrieving my stone, which had gone wide of the grid—a two-foot coping stone fell from the rim of the clock tower and crashed into the middle of the hopscotch playing area. It smashed into a hundred pieces, exactly where Ceri had been standing mere seconds earlier. We stared at it in stunned surprise.
“What the devil?” Gethin came hurtling out of the house a few scant moments afterward, drawn, he explained later, by the noise. He followed the direction of my stunned gaze up to the clock tower.
“It spoiled our game,” Ceri said impatiently, surveying the debris with her hands on her hips.
“I’ll get someone from the village to come down and check the tower is safe.” Gethin’s mouth was grim. “Are you all right?” he asked me belatedly.
“I’m fine, nothing like a bit of brisk masonry-dodging to keep a girl active.” I hid my shakiness behind flippancy. The thing was, as I took Ceri back into the house, I just couldn’t see, from any angle, where exactly the fallen stone had come from. There didn’t seem to be any gaps in the clock tower’s rim. Whichever way I looked at the situation, a near-fatal accident to my charge was hardly the most auspicious start to a new job.
* * *
Falling masonry aside, my first week at Taran House met with both triumph and disaster, and although I tried my best to treat those two impostors just the same, my mind was inclined to dwell more on the latter. Ceri was bright as a button but not particularly fond of academia. She had become highly skilled in the art of diversionary tactics. She would happily listen to my instruction, evincing every sign of interest and asking pertinent questions. When asked to actually do something by herself, however, she was less keen. Urgent visits to the bathroom, pointing out objects outside the window, trying to get me off-track and onto a different topic, tears and tantrums…all of these were used forcefully and with annoying regularity.
“Didn’t your teachers in Austria insist that you complete your work?” I asked in exasperation on the third day, when, after an hour, she had written three lines.
“Well, there were more people in the class, so they didn’t notice me. They thought I was a bit stupid,” she confessed naughtily, peeping up at me through her long lashes. “Tell me about when you were a little girl.”
“No,” I said bluntly. “Not until you have finished this writing.”
“Oh, well,” she replied blithely. “I didn’t really want to know. I was just being friendly.” She picked up her pen and wrote a few words. “Can I call you Lilly?” She placed the pen down again minutes later. I groaned, and she seemed to take that as acquiescence, since she called me by my first name from then on. I wasn’t sure her uncle would approve, but since he’d announced his intention of returning to London soon, I wasn’t expecting to see much of him. So it probably didn’t matter.
I discovered Ceri’s Achilles’ heel soon after that. She was fiercely competitive. As soon as I turned a lesson into a challenge, she would light up with determination. I have to admit, I exploited this character trait of hers quite shamelessly. A stopwatch became my best friend, and I only had to say the words, “I will win if you do not…” to have her full attention. From that point on, she was a pleasure to teach. I counted it as a triumph, but wished I could find an equally easy way to deal with the hurt, wary look in her eyes.
Mrs. Price was, without dispute, one of my disasters. I regarded her as slovenly and lazy, and I could not like her. The house could have been so beautiful, and although it was undoubtedly too much work for her and Gwladys to manage the rambling place on their own, she made no effort. Such wilful negligence infuriated me.
My days developed a pattern. I would eat breakfast early with Ceri, and then we spent the morning on the three Rs. We took our lunch together, either in the nursery or, weather permitting, as a picnic. Our afternoons were devoted to humanities, arts and sciences. On Saturdays we roamed the surrounding countryside studying the flora and fauna and—since there was nowhere nearby that was flat—engaging in some fairly strenuous exercise. On Sunday mornings we would read and discuss a shared book. I still had plenty of free time, and I decided to offer my services to Mrs. Price.
“I can give the rugs in the hall a jolly good scrub for starters,” I said, rolling my sleeves up and filling a bucket with hot, soapy water. The kitchen was a disgrace and my fingers itched to get a mop to the grimy red floor tiles. I suspected that the surly housekeeper might not take kindly to such blatant interference.
Gwladys regarded me with interest. She did not strike me as a lazy girl, but she did have a woeful role model. “I’ll help you with that, miss,” she offered, and I smiled my gratitude.
“That you’ll not, my girl!” Mrs. Price told her. “You’ve to go into the village and fetch the wool for my knitting, remember?” Gwladys rolled her eyes at me behind her back, and I bit back another smile. Mrs. Price regarded me with overt dislike. “What was it you said you did down there in London?” she asked rudely, looking me up and down. “You speak just like them posh ladies, but scrubbing carpets… Well, that’s not suited to the gentry.”
“No indeed,” I said serenely, lifting my bucket and grabbing up a brush. I was annoyed now and wanted to shock the sneer from her sour face. “My papa was a vicar and my mama the daughter of a judge, but my last job was in a burlesque club.” Her jaw dropped with a satisfying click. “You know, performing a striptease for the gentlemen customers. So you might say I’m a proper little scrubber!” I did an exaggerated bump-and-grind movement as I left the room, aware that I had only succeeded in compounding her dislike of me. And, of course, I’d given Gwladys something juicy to gossip about when she got home to her family that night. It would be all over the valley by morning.
Two weeks after my arrival at Taran House, Gethin made the journey back to London. We hadn’t exchanged more than a few short sentences after the incident with the falling masonry, and I couldn’t decide whether to feel disappointed or relieved as I watched the back of his car round the curve in the drive. He promised to be back in a week or two. I wondered if he would. Was he a triumph or a disast
er? Only time would supply the answer to that conundrum.
* * *
The road up to the village was steep and narrow with grassy banks topped by grey, drystone walls rising tall on each side. The little settlement itself was neatly tiered to fit the contours of the mountains. Green hills, part hidden by spring’s soft shroud, climbed up to shyly kiss the unyielding crags beyond. It was a bleakly beautiful place with high, narrow cottages built from local slate and dolerite chimneys bleeding smoke into the midday sky. Sheep-flock clouds competed with the pewter plumes to see which could make the heavens seem bluer. Ceri and I bought ice cream wafers at the tiny post office and sat on a wall in the weak sunlight to eat them.
“When your uncle spoke about the Taran lights, you looked worried.” She gave a little start of surprise at my words. “You shouldn’t let old ghost stories frighten you, you know.”
Her eyes were downcast, so I couldn’t read her expression. “But Gwladys said they come in search of fresh souls and gather up children while they sleep,” she whispered, with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder as though she expected a howling, shrieking cavalcade to bear down on us from behind.
“Gwladys talks utter rot sometimes,” I said, and Ceri laughed nervously.
She seemed to be examining a thought. “But I don’t just see the lights. I can see the hunters, as well—the figures inside the lights. They are on their horses, and they have dogs with them. Have you seen them, Lilly?”
“I have only seen the lights once. That was on my first night here.”
“I meant the hunters.” Her steady gaze reproached me for my evasiveness.
“Yes, I saw them, but they really are just tricks of the light.” I tried to reassure her as I would any child her age.
But Ceri was not like any other eight-year-old. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Lilly?” she asked, in her funny, young-old way. The solution dawned on me just before she could answer her own question. We said it together: “They are hunters.” Viscous, black nightmares poured into my mind, filling my soul and staining it with darkness.