The Secret of Nightingale Wood

by Lucy Strange

  A ghastly figure stepped into the clearing, the shadows of the moonlit trees creating a cage of darkness around it. It spread its scraggy arms wide and a ragged blanket opened like reptilian wings. It stared into the darkness, searching, hunting . . . Its face was lit by the fire now – a woman’s face, white as bone – feral, hollow and dangerous. Her hair was a mess of thick, twisted snakes. I thought of the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid. I thought of Medusa . . . Her stony stare penetrated the darkness and found me there, clinging to my tree. She breathed in – a slow, crackling gasp. I didn’t hide. I just stood there, petrified. Her head jerked down and her elbows shot up in two bony points so that she looked like a spider about to leap upon its prey. I opened my mouth to scream, but I couldn’t make a sound. Her eyes burned into me. She took another step forward, curled back her lips, and hissed . . .

  And I ran.

  I could hardly speak at breakfast the next morning. Every time I moved my head I saw a scrawny black cat crawling in the shadows under the furniture. Every time I blinked I saw the witch’s face seared on the insides of my eyelids – a terrible face, white with anger, frozen in a vicious hiss . . . I couldn’t eat anything. Nanny Jane kept frowning at me.

  There was a knock at the front door and a few seconds later Mrs Berry came into the dining room. She passed a telegram to Nanny Jane, and the eyes of the two women met meaningfully. I knew it was a look I was not supposed to have seen. Nanny Jane opened the telegram and glanced at it quickly before refolding it and placing it beneath a pile of other letters.

  I stared at her. Well?

  She said nothing. She poured herself a cup of tea.

  Eventually I said, ‘Was that a telegram, Nanny Jane?’

  She looked at me as if to say, You know perfectly well it was a telegram, young lady. Then she said, ‘It’s from your father. His work has taken him to Italy and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to come home for a while yet.’

  I took a moment to consider this. ‘To Italy?’

  ‘Until November.’

  ‘Until November?’

  ‘Please try to stop being a Polly parrot, Henry.’

  ‘But November is months away. He can’t stay away from us that long.’

  ‘He’s working, Henry. He has to work . . .’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  Nanny Jane’s lips pursed and tightened. That’s enough questions. She didn’t say it out loud, but she didn’t need to. What wasn’t she telling me?

  Half an hour later, Nanny Jane announced that she needed to go to the nearby village, Little Birdham, to send a telegram to Father in reply. I waved as she wheeled Piglet’s perambulator down the driveway. And while I waved, I made a plan . . .

  As soon as they had gone, I closed the front door and ran up the stairs. I paused for a moment: my bedroom was in front of me; to my right was the darker section of landing leading to my parents’ rooms and bathroom; the corridor to my left led to the nursery and Nanny Jane’s room. I turned left and walked straight to her room, trying to ignore the warnings of my conscience as I twisted the door knob.

  The door opened to reveal a small, bright bedroom that smelt of lavender and starched linen. I had never seen inside Nanny Jane’s room before, but it was pleasingly familiar. The bed was neatly made with white sheets and a floral counterpane; a Jane Austen novel – Pride and Prejudice – sat on the pillow. A white-painted door opened on to the adjoining nursery.

  I was all prepared to play Sherlock Holmes, but I didn’t need to search very hard: on the dressing table, next to a hairbrush and Nanny Jane’s coin purse, lay the pile of letters, and there at the bottom was Father’s telegram.

  My hands shook as I unfolded the paper and read the typed message.

  Not home for several months Italy and then Switzerland until November STOP Do not give permission for Mrs A admittance STOP Tell Dr H treatment must be given at home for now STOP Will write STOP

  I read it several times, trying to make sense of the oddly abrupt words. His work was going to keep him abroad until at least November. He didn’t give permission for Mama’s admittance. Admittance to what? I remembered Nanny Jane’s tightened lips and her whispered conversations with Doctor Hardy.

  I took care to leave everything exactly as I had found it and closed the door behind me. I felt a wave of relief – and then guilt. It wasn’t nice to go snooping in other people’s rooms.

  The corridor stretched darkly ahead of me, ending with the sealed silence of Mama’s room. I felt another surge of guilt as I turned the handle of her door. It was locked.

  Locked from the inside or the outside? Was she a prisoner, or did she simply want to be left alone?

  I imagined her in there, staring up at the cracked ceiling . . .

  I knocked softly.

  There was only silence. I pressed my ear to the thick wood but could hear nothing beyond the thudding of my own pulse.

  ‘Mama?’ I called.

  No reply.

  I knelt down and looked through the keyhole. Nanny Jane would go berserk if she knew what I was up to – sneaking into other people’s rooms, spying through keyholes – Hardly appropriate behaviour for a young lady, Henrietta! It was too dark to see much through the keyhole – just a vague shape in the bed.

  ‘Mama?’ I called again, my voice buzzing against the wood, so close to my lips.

  The shape in the bed moved and I thought I heard a sound like a low sob. Then there was silence once more.

  I sat there for some time, my back against the door, trying to decide what to do. I had read about people opening locks with hairpins, but that was just in stories . . . Then I remembered the locking of Mama’s door the previous night. Doctor Hardy, I thought. Doctor Hardy has done this. Anger surged through me. I wished I could grow into a giant, like Alice. People would have to listen to me if I were nine feet tall: You’re nothing but a pack of cards . . .

  As my thoughts drifted, I noticed an odd thing about the wooden panelling beside Mama’s door. The dark wood was patterned with carved lines and squares, but here, at the edge of one pattern, were two hinges.

  It was a small door.

  A cupboard? I followed the line of the door up, right and down, and found a keyhole. It was so small and so carefully placed that it looked like a knot in the wood. There was no door knob or handle. I tried to prise the door open with my fingers but the crack around the edge was much too narrow. My fingernails filled with scrapings of old sticky varnish and dirt. I pressed against the door in frustration and, to my surprise, it clicked and sprang open.

  It wasn’t a cupboard.

  Beyond the little door rose a steep, narrow flight of carpeted stairs. I stooped below the opening, taking care to pull the door almost shut behind me.

  The stairs were thick with dust and smelt of mould and mouse droppings. I sneezed twice and then started to climb, slowly and carefully. Sunlight shone through the dusty air above me as through a morning mist. I had the strange thought that I might somehow appear in a story-book world above the clouds, or in the turret of a fairy-tale castle.

  At the top of the staircase, I found myself in the middle of a square attic. I stood quite still. I remembered the smells of our attic in London – the attic Robert and I used to play in – sawdust and books and rusty Meccano; enamel paint and glue for all Robert’s model trains and ships . . . Panicked memories flapped around me like bats. I beat them back – No, that was a different attic, Hen, a different house . . . I looked around. Ancient wooden beams sloped up to an apex above the staircase and directly in front of me was a large round window, as big as a cartwheel. It overlooked the driveway at the front of the house, and the patchwork of fields and woodland beyond stretched all the way to the sparkling blue sea.

  I could see a white lighthouse standing on a distant cliff, and wondered if it was the one Mama, Father and Robert had visited before I was born. I touched the windowpane with my fingertips. The glass was gritty with dust.

  Dust clung to the rotte
n window frame, too, to a wooden toy chest at the foot of a narrow bed, and to everything else in the room. On a shelf on the wall a row of model ships sat becalmed in dust, their rigging thick with cobwebs, like a fleet of miniature Mary Celestes. I felt a swift, sharp pain of recognition in my chest. This was a boy’s bedroom, or it had been, once. A boy like Robert, perhaps. A row of books on a low shelf by the window included Treasure Island, Peter and Wendy, South Sea Tales, Moonfleet . . .

  I picked up the copy of Moonfleet and held it gently in my palm. Then I allowed the pages to fall open as they wished. It was a favourite game of mine with other people’s books. The thick, yellowed pages parted and fell quite naturally near the end, and I read the description of ‘Maskew’s Match’ – the lamp lit nightly by Grace Maskew to guide her long-lost love, John Trenchard, safely back home.

  I closed the book and looked once more around the room. Cobwebs hung in great swathes from the rafters. One long, dusty tendril dangled almost to the floor. My eyes fell upon the wooden toy chest and, my head filled with those tales of peril and adventure, I immediately thought of smugglers’ gold and pirate treasure.

  Very carefully, I opened the lid, expecting to be blinded by a gleam of diamonds and doubloons . . .

  But it was full of toys. A broken kite, tangled in its own strings; a ship’s telescope; a wooden sword, the handle worn quite smooth. I felt a pang of conscience. For the second time that morning, I was aware that I was trespassing. No one had told me not to go into this room – no one had told me it even existed – but I felt a sick, guilty feeling in my stomach, as if I had accidentally trodden on someone’s grave. I closed the lid of the toy box gently and wiped my hands on my pinafore.

  From far below, echoing through the hallway, up the stairs and through the secret doorway, I heard the metallic pounding of the knocker on the front door. My heart pounded back, as if in reply. I froze. The cobweb dangling above me swung in an invisible breeze. I crept back down the dusty stairs.

  The little wooden door clicked shut behind me and I tiptoed down the landing. When I heard Nanny Jane’s voice in the hallway, I froze once more. How had she returned from the village so quickly? For a moment I entertained the thought that the attic room was indeed part of a fairy-tale world and that my five minutes there had, perhaps, been five hours in the real world . . .

  ‘I’m absolutely sure,’ Nanny Jane was saying in what I recognized as her coolest, firmest voice. ‘This is the Abbott family. They’ve been renting Hope House since the beginning of the summer.’

  I heard the lower tones of a man’s voice, though I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  ‘No,’ Nanny Jane replied. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t answer your questions just now. Mrs Berry might be able to help you, though. Could you call at a more convenient time, perhaps? . . . Very well. Goodbye.’ She closed the door, and I didn’t have to see her face to know her lips were tightly pursed.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked, clumping innocently down the stairs.

  ‘A rather strange man,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘How are you back from the village so soon, Nanny Jane?’ I added.

  ‘Questions, questions, questions,’ she said impatiently as she passed me on the stairs. ‘I forgot my purse.’ As she marched towards her bedroom, I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t been caught in there, snooping.

  I crossed the hallway, passed Piglet’s parked pram, and opened the front door very quietly. We had had very few visitors since moving to Hope House and I was curious.

  The thin, dark figure of a man was walking down the drive, away from the house. I had never seen him before. His swift, uneven gait, and a walking stick shooting out to his side, made him look like a scuttling spider.

  ‘T his one’s sure to tempt your mother, Miss Henrietta,’ Mrs Berry said.

  It was a few days later and we were in the kitchen, making a cake. I stirred lemon juice and orange peel into the batter, breathing in the fresh, bright sweetness. I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t think it was likely that Mama could be cured by a St Clement’s cake. Through the open window I heard a bird squawking noisily; something must have frightened it. I looked out into the garden just in time to see a small dark cat slinking into the hedge and vanishing. I blinked. Was it the cat from the forest? The witch’s cat?

  Mrs Berry tried again: ‘Saw you out in the garden this morning, Miss,’ she said, breaking two eggs into a bowl, ‘taking your little sister out for a bit of sunshine as usual. Our country air will do you both the power of good after all that London smog. Little Miss Roberta’s ever such a bonny girl, isn’t she? No danger of her losing her appetite!’

  I agreed, concentrating on mixing the batter, trying to get every last bit of flour off the edges of the bowl. My eyes were heavy from another sleepless night. The mysterious limping man who had appeared at our door a few days ago had somehow crept inside my head. He scuttled through my nightmares like an insect.

  Mrs Berry inclined her head towards me and whispered dramatically, ‘Now, you must be careful on those walks of yours, Miss Henrietta. Just you stay in the garden – there’s all sorts of terrors in the deep, dark woods, you know!’ She was smiling but her eyes were wide with mock-horror.

  I tried to look suitably mock-scared. Inside, I was genuinely frightened. The very idea of heading back into those dark woods was enough to make me feel ill: I felt a painful pulsing behind my eyes. I kept stirring the cake mixture.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, folks round here say there’s a witch living in Nightingale Wood . . . A real witch with a broomstick and everything. She’ll turn you into a toad, soon as look at you!’

  ‘Goodness!’ I said. Fear crackled in my chest.

  ‘My little nephew was in those woods in the autumn, looking for conkers, and he said the witch shrieked curses at him and chased him on her broomstick like a hellish harpy.’ She chuckled. ‘Poor little chap won’t go in there at all now!’

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘Goodness!’ again and laughed. I swallowed hard.

  While Mrs Berry talked, my mind was dragged helplessly back to that night in the woods. I saw the witch, lit by the flickering fire – her bone-white face, her snake-hair, her wild, staring eyes . . .

  ‘Give it here, Miss,’ Mrs Berry said gently, taking the bowl and the wooden spoon from me and beating the cake mixture until it looked like satin. She poured the batter into a round metal tin, scraping the bowl noisily, then passed the wooden spoon back to me and winked; it was covered in thick, sweet cake mixture.

  I walked down to the bottom of the garden, right to the fringes of the forest – as close as I dared to go. There was a pond here, tucked away in a shady corner. Beside the pond stood a mossy wooden bench with a high back and sides – perfect for a smallish girl to curl up on. I spread a blanket on the bench and sat there for a while, a copy of The Railway Children on my lap, watching the goldfish drifting about, and trying to spot the improbable little faces of the frogs poking out of the water. My head was still aching and I felt a bit dizzy. There was a peculiar kind of heat and pressure behind my eyes. I took a few lungfuls of Mrs Berry’s good country air, and opened my book.

  Father and Mama had given me The Railway Children for my tenth birthday. Father had chosen it because of its title – he was a railway engineer. That was what he was doing in Italy right now: designing new tracks, bridges and tunnels.

  In London, Father used to come home from work with bundles of plans – drawings and calculations which Robert and I loved to look at. I thought they were beautiful – a precise tangle of straight lines and tiny, pencilled symbols, but the numbers meant nothing to me; I couldn’t connect them to anything solid. For Robert, it was as if the numbers just sprang into the air and became something real . . .

  I wondered if my imagination would be able to conjure him up again. I closed my eyes and pictured him in the London attic, playing with his model trains. ‘More coal for the engine!’ h
e would shout, moving the train more quickly along the track. ‘More coal, fire-boy!’

  Fire-boy . . . I opened my eyes and looked up into the white sky above. A beautiful image appeared – a boy born of fire, like a human phoenix. I saw a child created by flames – a laughing, burning boy-god. Flaming wings rose from his back and he became an angel, glorious with light.

  I closed my eyes tightly again until the image dissolved. Then I tried to concentrate on my book.

  I had been reading for about twenty minutes when an odd feeling crept over me. I was certain I was not alone.

  Robert?

  No . . .

  I looked up from the pages of my book and saw a small brown and black cat sitting neatly on the far side of the pond. It was the witch’s cat. It was staring into the water, following the movement of a fat goldfish with its yellow-green eyes.

  ‘Hello,’ I whispered.

  The cat looked up at me, and then looked back at the goldfish. It leant forward, shifting its weight so it could raise a front paw. It reached out and touched the water, springing back again when the cold water rippled and the fish darted away.

  Then it looked straight at me and blinked very slowly. It walked around the pond, right up to my legs, and rubbed its cheek on my knee. For a second, I thought it was going to hiss or bite me, but it didn’t. Instead, it made a throaty little squeak, turned away, and disappeared into the gloom of the forest, just like Alice’s white rabbit vanishing down the rabbit hole.

  I stood up, and sat down again.

  ‘Go on, Hen,’ Robert’s voice seemed to whisper. ‘Go on . . . Or are you scared?’

  I stood up.

  And followed it.

  As I walked, Mrs Berry’s words of broomsticks and harpies twisted into visions of terror in my mind. . . Was there really a witch in the woods?

  I told myself I was too old to believe in such things, but as soon as I left the garden behind and entered the strange silence of the forest I started shivering. I kept walking, though. I needed to see her. I needed to see if I could be brave. My head was pounding now and my throat was swollen and sore.