The Woman In the Mirror

by Rebecca James

  It was hard to be sure from where Alice Miller was writing. Each letter was stamped in the top corner with a red badge, CERTIFIED, but there was no return address. Only late at night, when she was sifting the dirt off another bundle, did she uncover the record. It was a typed sheet, stained sepia, brittle to touch.

  On it was a form, with most of the requirements filled in. Name: Alice Elizabeth Miller. Born: August 3, 1919. Place of birth: Epsom, Surrey. Occupation: Governess.

  Rachel skimmed the sheet. At the foot she found what she was looking for.

  Reasons for confinement: Hysteria, Melancholy, Delusion.

  Methods of treatment: Psychotherapy, Sedative, Electroconvulsive.

  She struggled to make sense of it. Questions abounded. Had Alice worked for Jonathan de Grey? Had she been his children’s governess? Why had she been taken to this asylum against her will, and kept despite her protests? The ‘secret’ she was carrying, could it have been a child? And, if it were, had it been his?

  An idea occurred to Rachel as she sat surrounded by upturned crates in the dwindling firelight. Supposing Alice Miller was the grandmother she’d been searching for. Supposing Alice had had an affair with her employer and become pregnant with his child – with Rachel’s birth mother. Supposing she had been sent away to have the baby… It had been common in those days, women left alone to deal with the consequences of a mutual act, and the derision and pain they endured.

  Why hadn’t Jonathan responded? Whatever Alice had been to him, to ignore such desperate correspondence showed a hard-hearted man. It seemed that the captain had read these letters then forgotten them, parcelling them up out of sight.

  Rachel held the record to her chest, as if by keeping it close she could connect with this woman in another time, who had been in this very house; this woman who had known suffering in whatever place she was kept, her pleas falling on deaf ears… She imagined the infamy de Grey’s affair would have brought on him, his children finding out and the rampant town gossip. He had already lost his wife during the war. Would he have realised his mistake and forced Alice out of Winterbourne?

  Rachel checked herself. Her every invention could be just that: wholly untrue. And yet try as she might, she could not shake the vision of Alice Miller and Jonathan de Grey, and that somehow they were the key to her story. And that the ‘secret’ Alice spoke of wasn’t just her own: it belonged to Rachel, too.

  *

  The adrenalin she felt over those forty-eight hours could only be likened to the energy she’d run on in New York. Sleep was a necessity, not an indulgence; food was required instead of enjoyed. Anything that got in the way of her discoveries was a nuisance, and Rachel would wake after a burst of sleep desperate to resume her task. She dreamed fevered dreams of the woman called Alice and the man called Jonathan; she imagined in her half-awake state that she heard children’s cries in the hall vaults, snapping floorboards, the sound of smothered laughter and the patter of running feet. And all the while a ghostly hand seemed to hover at her back, guiding her forward, showing her the way, willing her to unearth the truth. Rachel wondered at the baby Alice had been carrying, if indeed it was a baby, and she reached for that possibility tentatively, hesitantly, as if frightened it would evaporate the moment they touched. Since discovering her link to Winterbourne she had assumed her birth mother would have been raised here, but now Rachel considered that perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps her mother had never so much as seen the house, perhaps she had been born far away, and been denied her heritage just as Rachel had been denied hers. Each time she shed light on one mystery, a dozen more appeared. Possibilities grew before her eyes.

  Only when she had emptied the last of the boxes and read everything they contained – from the beseeching letters to the notes of aching love; from the fury Alice Miller felt against her employer to the longing she harboured to be with him; from the manic rants against Winterbourne to the odes of affection towards it; from the hateful messages about the ‘devil-sent’ twins to the remorseful retractions thereof; from the fear she felt at her pregnancy to the joy that they shared this bond – Rachel was exhausted. She bathed in a shallow bath and lit fires in the kitchen, where she curled her fingers round a mug of cocoa and worked out her next move.

  There was no way she could relinquish Winterbourne now and return to America. She would have to stay and see this discovery through, for it might be her only shot. For a long time, when she was a girl, Rachel had envisaged families as being tied together by an invisible cord. Her own, drooping from her navel, was untethered at its other end, and she would watch everybody else tied up and it was only she who floated alone. Alice and Jonathan were her moorings: she was sure of it.

  There was just one missing piece, the piece that joined them.

  My mother.

  She was startled by a sound from downstairs. It was a sharp bump, like something heavy falling from a shelf. Rachel stood and went through the hall to the little staircase beyond, opening the door. She had never crossed into the servants’ quarters, that subterranean labyrinth beneath her feet, and as the cool, dark pit glared back at her she admitted it was far from enticing. What was down there apart from a ton of cobwebs and yet more neglected rooms? Nothing to be afraid of.

  The sharp gust of cool air that wafted up to greet her brought to mind a bygone, foreign world, a world of ringing bells and rushing servants, of supper trays and hurrying footsteps, smelling as it did of leather and damp, of cold stone and rot. She shone her flashlight on the steps, which were slippery beneath a drip in the ceiling, and her descent made a peculiar, muffled sound, as if there were a delay between the instant her foot met the surface and the instant Rachel heard it.

  At the bottom of the steps was a long passage. She shone her light on it, rendering it harshly bright up close and then dissolving into murk. High on the wall was a tarnished bell box, its glass case so stippled that it was scarcely possible to see the labels beneath. Drip, drip… The leaks continued, fissures in the stone that wept to the floor. The passage was lined with doors and she peered behind some: empty rooms, long since cleared, and there was a gloomy pantry still cluttered with stained tins and cans.

  Rachel was deciding that she had imagined the thumping noise, for what could possibly have made it down here, when she noticed, at the end of the passage, another flight of steps. This one was shorter, just a few, and she had to duck under the low ceiling to get down. The space she emerged into could only be the cellar: it still carried a very faint tang of wine, and a pile of crates was stacked up on a bottle rack.

  The thing her eye was drawn to, however, was a small access in the mould-covered stone, set beneath a gothic peak. It was bizarrely small, as if intended for someone to crawl instead of walk through. Rachel’s torch exposed its cracked veneer and the circular handle that wouldn’t budge, though she gave it her best shove. Frowning, she shoved it again. That was strange, for the sound her effort made echoed exactly the sound she had detected from upstairs. How could that be?

  She settled on there being some draught pipe on the other side of the door – though it occurred to her, even as she rested on the conclusion, that what she had heard (to hear it two floors up and on the wrong side of the house) must have been caused by an awfully big draught. Rachel tried the handle again and to her surprise it rotated smoothly this time. She pushed the door but nothing happened. And then, as quickly as it had given, the handle locked again, partway round, which was absurd because she had just released it – and more absurd still because the loop didn’t feel as if it had snagged on a mechanism, rather it felt as if somebody, somebody on the other side, had it in their grip. As she continued to try the handle, and as whatever had caught it continued their objection, it felt as if they were in a stalemate. Rachel had the sensation of being connected to a living thing, her will against theirs, both stooped with effort, invisible to the other and with only this strange little door between them. For a moment the sensation was so strong that she dropped the handle, burne
d.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she muttered, and the sound of her voice was reassuring in the dark – normal and ordinary. The dark was so close down here, close enough to be a physical thing, all around her, filling her ears and mouth. All at once a feeling of hopelessness overtook her. Loneliness assaulted her from nowhere – and not just physical loneliness at being in this vast house on her own, but a basic, inescapable, emotional loneliness, the loneliness she had lived with since Seth. Defeated, she slumped down, her back against the door. She missed him so much that it went beyond tears, became calm, became numb, that familiar emptiness. Was she always going to feel this lonely? Would she ever find a place in the world that welcomed her, that showed her belonging and wanted her close? Rachel flicked off the flashlight and the dark rushed in at her, thick as mud. Doggedly she remained in it, remained here in the dark, alone, in the silence, because this was her fear, the solitude she avoided at all costs because it brought up her memories: recollections of the day she lost Seth.

  She flicked the light on again, breaking through the surface. And then off – pitch black, covering her face and eyes like a shroud. In the dark she could draw the memories out as real as day, all the facts she ran from in her daily life, busying herself because she was running from this, this very thing, this darkness, this stillness, this was it. She could see his face, the last time she had kissed it before he left for work. She could hear the phone bleating, could hear the voice as she picked it up, a voice she would never forget. Rachel, it’s not good news. But you know already, right?

  On the light went. She filled her lungs. Then she dove back down, absolute black, and this time it was his voice she heard, on her birthday, at the picnic he had organised for her, just the two of them. He had kissed her. I’ll never leave you, Rachel. You’ve been left before, I know, but this is where it ends. With me… Us.

  Us.

  She clicked the torch once more, unable to bear it any longer – and it was hard to tell what happened first because the light was on and then she saw it, or she saw it as the light came on, or maybe before, maybe she felt it before she saw it, but then there it was – it – only it was impossible, she was dreaming; she was tired, sleep-deprived, it couldn’t be there. A woman.

  A dreadful woman, a dreadful shape, no, it couldn’t be, it was impossible. Rachel gasped, staggered to her feet, the flashlight falling from her hands; it struck the floor and spun, coating the walls in light she was horrified to meet, and she stooped to grab it and then she ran. She ran up the little steps and along the servants’ corridor, every part of her shaking, hearing scurrying footsteps behind her but terrified to turn back, terrified, and she ran up, up, up to the main floor and then suddenly the bells were ringing, from nowhere, louder and louder and louder, chimes clamouring from the bell box on the wall, operated by some terrible, invisible hand, bells clattering this way and that like shrieking children caught in a fire. On and on they rang their ceaseless, deafening chime, ringing all around, above, below, just as the darkness had surrounded her, a terrible uproar, and still she heard that scampering at her heels like the paws of a ravenous animal—

  She reached the hall and banged the door shut behind her. She had no key for it and so dragged the heavy chest across to meet it, jamming it against the wood. The hall appeared dreadful, she was losing herself, losing herself to the memories that crawled and crept and pulled her down – only she had gone down, just then, willingly, hadn’t she, inviting herself to the dark! She should have known; she should never have gone. She stopped, breathed, and there were no bells. No rushing footsteps.

  Nothing. Silence.

  I’m tired. Rachel repeated it like a mantra. That’s all. I’m tired. I’m tired.

  It was late, she had to sleep, and she went there and lay on the sheets, shivering with cold and fear, waiting for that awful din to start up again, thinking she could still hear it, that the bells had been as real as the nightmare downstairs, and it might have been hours before sleep claimed her or it might have been minutes.

  Chapter 19

  It didn’t take long, come the morning, for Rachel to dismiss the previous night’s events as fantastical. With the clear band of daylight that streamed into her bedroom and the steady wash of the sea, so her lucidity returned. It was obvious, now, that her preoccupation with Alice Miller’s correspondence had put her on edge and had made her hear, and see, things that weren’t there. Her imaginings had got the better of her.

  There was no doubt that Winterbourne was kinder in the day. As Rachel pulled on jeans and a shirt, she reflected that the very architecture of the place, especially by night, was enough to play with the most level of heads. At times it felt so isolated that it was possible to believe she was the last person left on earth – that there was nobody else alive, no other people anywhere, just her.

  So it was with a concentrated sort of dispassion that Rachel perceived the black stains on her way downstairs. They affected the large arched window on the west front and were so defined, and so at odds with the clear panes adorning every other aperture, that she stopped. She went to touch the glass but the stains were on the outside; and on closer inspection appeared to have some kind of organic matter contained inside them, as if someone had thrown a sack at the window filled with paint, and what appeared to be, though surely couldn’t be, small clumps of fur.

  She stepped outside. The day was bracing, encouraging, and she walked round to the west gable, expecting to have to wrench a ladder from the stables in order to decipher the problem – but it transpired to be simpler than that. Rachel saw the dark heap immediately, a queer, localised massacre, and bent to examine it.

  Bats. Dozens of them, their bodies crumpled, and when she looked up at the window from this new vantage she could only think that they had flown straight into it. Puzzled, she lifted one of the bats’ wings – it was amazingly light and translucent, and completely without life – and let it drop. It was beyond peculiar. Rachel had been aware of bats at Winterbourne, swooping at dusk and nesting among the gargoyles, but why they should have annihilated themselves in this way was extraordinary.

  ‘You’re still alive, then.’

  She had been so absorbed that she hadn’t heard Jack arrive, and now turned to see his car parked out front. He was leaning against the wall, all six-feet-whatever of him, his big hands in his pockets. ‘I haven’t seen you since Polcreath,’ he said. ‘Wondered if you’d ridden your bike into a ditch.’

  ‘How thoughtful.’

  He peered past her to the bats. ‘That’s a mess,’ he said.

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I have no idea. I just found them.’

  Jack crouched to the pile. She saw the patch of lightly greying hair at the tops of his ears and thought it might be attractive, were it not for the rest of him.

  ‘Poor things must’ve got spooked,’ he said.

  ‘Does that happen?’

  He squinted up at her. ‘I can imagine it happens at Winterbourne.’ Then, with a note of humour, ‘No need to look so worried. Animals are unpredictable. All it takes is one of them to go batty,’ he was pleased at his own joke, ‘and it sets the whole lot of them off. Pack instinct. Or, in this case, colony.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You want help clearing it up?’

  She couldn’t say no, and was grateful for the help with the ladder and buckets as they wiped clean the window and heaped the unfortunate bodies on to a shovel. Jack talked the entire time, about his dogs, about his farm, about his sister and her kids who were coming to visit this weekend and how he was preparing himself for a full-scale assault because his nephews never left him alone.

  ‘Have you got little ones in your family?’ he asked.

  Rachel shook her head. ‘I don’t really have any family.’ ‘No?’

  ‘NO?’ He gestured to the building. ‘What about this lot?’

  She leaned on the shovel, and the truth seemed suddenly easy to speak.


  ‘I never knew them,’ she admitted. ‘I was adopted from England when I was a baby and taken to the States. My adoptive parents are dead now, and I never had any brothers or sisters. Last week I found out about Winterbourne and, well, here I am. I’ve got a chance now to find out about the parents I never met, and their parents, and all of the de Greys. It’s a part of myself I never knew. I still don’t know it. I’m just finding out.’ She stopped. Jack was listening, looking at her deeply, and she felt that she had to say more so she added, ‘It’s nice to hear about busy, bustling families like yours. I always kind of wanted that. Lots of people, lots of love.’

  He was still watching her. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I’m sorry, you know, about your adoption.’

  ‘It was a happy adoption. They were good people.’

  ‘But I didn’t realise. I’m sorry.’

  ‘How could you have?’ She smiled. ‘It’s fine. Really.’

  He was quieter after that, and they finished the job swiftly. Jack seemed keen to stick around – was there anything else she needed help with? He had the morning free – so she invited him in for a well-earned mug of tea.

  ‘What’s that doing there?’ he asked inside the hall. Rachel clocked the Elizabethan chest pushed up against the door to the downstairs, and laughed.

  ‘I got a little freaked in the night,’ she confessed. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like nothing. How did you move that thing on your own?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She conceded it looked impossibly hefty now. ‘But I did.’

  ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘The old servants’ rooms. They’re as much of a wreck as you can imagine. I thought I heard something so I followed it down there, but I was mistaken. I hadn’t slept and…’ She trailed off. ‘Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Those bats against the window, probably.’ Rachel tried to make light of it but Jack regarded her seriously. ‘And then I was down in the cellar, and…’ She shook her head. ‘It was crazy, but I could swear someone was with me.’