by Alex Bell
He opened the door at my knock, Murphy hopping around his feet in excitement.
“Jemima!” he exclaimed, beaming at me.
“I can’t stay,” I said at once. “Miss Grayson has sent me to my room and will be furious if she finds I’m gone. There’s something I need to ask you. Something that can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“What is it?” Henry asked, immediately serious.
“You mentioned that Estella almost died last year after Miss Grayson put her in Solitary for several days?”
“That’s right,” Henry replied. “It was August and there was a heatwave. It was all hushed up, of course. Miss Grayson doesn’t want any negative publicity for the school.”
“Do you know what Estella did to get put in there in the first place? I looked in the Punishment Book and it said she was punished for lying, but it doesn’t say what the lie was. Do you happen to know?”
“I do,” Henry replied. “In fact, you and I have spoken about it before. The girls were all very upset about it at the time and so were the maids. You see, there used to be a girl who worked here called Dolores. She fell down the servants’ stairs and died a couple of years ago.”
“Yes, Miss Grayson told me.”
“Well, last summer, Estella told everyone that she had seen Dolores, that she’d even spoken to her, on the servants’ staircase. It caused a terrible furore at the time. That’s why Estella got put in Solitary.” He gave me another close look. “But why does any of that matter now, Mim?”
I hadn’t meant to tell him but, somehow, the words spilled out of me anyway. “I’ve seen Dolores, too,” I said. “I saw her on my first day at the school. She was on the servants’ staircase, dusting the banister. She seemed surprised when I spoke to her and I thought perhaps it was because no one had told her I was coming, but now I think it must have been because she didn’t expect me to be able to see her.”
Henry grasped my arm gently. “But, Mim, old thing,” he said, “you don’t believe in ghosts. You’ve told me so many times. All those séances you held with your mother were completely fake, weren’t they?”
I rubbed at my temples with my hand. Henry knew the truth about our séances well enough. After all, his mother had designed my special shoes with the concealed wooden block herself.
“I know,” I said, “but I did see Dolores, Henry, and I spoke with her, too—”
“Jemima! What the devil has happened to your hands?” Henry exclaimed.
I dropped my hand and looked at my bloodied fingers.
“Oh,” I said. “That was Miss Grayson’s punishment for the girls and me. We’ve been sewing all day. There was an incident last night with the dolls—”
“Come inside for a moment,” Henry said, gently tugging me over the threshold.
I found myself standing in a cosy little kitchen with a wooden table in the centre of the room and Murphy now warming himself in front of a fire.
“Sit down at the table, Mim,” Henry said.
“But Miss Grayson—”
“If she finds out then I’ll tell her I kidnapped you. It’ll be my fault entirely.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue with him, so I pulled out a chair and sat down. Murphy struggled to his feet and hopped straight over to me, flopping down and laying his scruffy head on my feet. It was a relief to stroke his ears and allow my mind to go blank for a moment.
“I suppose Miss Grayson withheld meals today, too?” Henry said. “I hear that’s a favourite punishment of hers.”
“That’s right,” I replied. “She was in a terribly bad mood with us all.”
A few minutes later, Henry placed a cup of tea and a plate of toast in front of me, before setting down a bowl of soapy warm water and settling himself on the floor beside me. “Can you manage all right with one hand, if I clean the other?” he asked.
“I can. Thank you.”
Henry took one of my hands and carefully rinsed away the blood, gently cleaning the many pricks and cuts, while I set upon the tea and toast. I hadn’t realized quite how ravenous I was until that moment. As I was enjoying the food, though, I felt a deep throb of guilt for the girls who’d gone to bed hungry back at the school, especially Estella.
Henry didn’t speak, for which I was grateful, but bent over my hand in silent concentration. Gazing down at his chestnut curls, I felt an almost overpowering surge of affection for him. He really was quite the most kind, decent, wonderful person I had ever met. But something had broken in me back at Whiteladies and I was no longer the person Henry had once loved.
Finally he finished with my hands and threw away the bowl of bloody water before pulling out a chair across from me.
“I suppose you think I’ve absolutely lost my mind,” I said, putting down my empty cup.
“Not a bit of it,” Henry replied. To my surprise, he reached over and took my hand in his. “If you tell me you saw Dolores at the school then, of course, I believe you. It does mean that Estella isn’t the liar everyone believes her to be, though.”
“Yes,” I said. “I need to speak to her.” I looked back at him. “Henry, thank you for everything but now I really must go.” I stood up.
Henry moved past me to open the front door. As I walked by he said, “Just remember I’m here. If you ever want to tell me about it.”
I looked at him but his gaze was fixed on his feet rather than me. I touched his arm briefly, then stepped out into the freezing evening. I’d already been gone longer than I’d meant to and I clutched my cloak tightly about me as I hurried across the grounds.
When I was only a few metres away, I glanced up just in time to see a light suddenly switch on. Even before counting the windows, I knew which room it was shining from. Someone was up in the toy room again, with the dolls.
I quickened my pace back towards the school.
Chapter Eighteen
Isle of Skye – January 1910
I quietly let myself into the schoolhouse and made my way directly to the toy room. The door was slightly ajar, light spilling out into the corridor. When I pushed it open and stepped in, I half expected Estella or one of the other girls to be there, but the room was empty. Miss Grayson must have brought up the basket of dolls, for I saw it placed just inside the room, the Frozen Charlottes laid out in their new outfits.
My eyes went straight to the dolls’ house version of Whiteladies and, once again, I saw that there was a single light on. The light inside Edward Redwing’s study.
Charlotte says something bad happened in that room…
Unbuttoning my cloak, I walked over and pulled open the front of the house. Immediately I saw that someone had placed three dolls inside, grouped together in the wood-panelled room. Firstly there was the Frozen Charlie Estella had been making suits for earlier. Secondly the Frozen Charlotte in the cornflower blue dress I’d noticed on Bess’s desk. And finally a Frozen Charlotte in a pale green tea gown with an empire waistline and a flowery porcelain bonnet attached to her head. I couldn’t help thinking that Mother had owned several bonnets like this, as well as a Lucile dress Redwing had bought on their honeymoon that was almost the exact same shade of green.
The doll wearing the bonnet lay on the floor behind the desk, with just her feet poking out the other side. The Frozen Charlotte in the cornflower blue gown had been awkwardly placed in the armchair beside the fire, just where I had always sat during Redwing’s trance sessions. And the Frozen Charlie was standing behind this chair. He’d been propped up in such a way that he leaned forward slightly, looming over the Frozen Charlotte, the tiny hawk cane cradled in the crook of his arm. Just the sight of the little scene made a shiver run through me.
It could only be a coincidence. No one here at the school knew anything about what had happened at Whiteladies.
Hastily I snatched up the dolls, ignoring the cane that rolled across the floor. I took them over to the basket by the door where, to my surprise, I saw the toy-room key, glinting dully in among all those pale limbs.
When I opened the door and peered into the dormitory, I saw that almost all of the girls were in their beds. No doubt they were trying to keep warm. With no fire, the room was bitterly cold, and going hungry was only likely to make them feel even colder.
There was just one girl who wasn’t in bed and that was Estella. She was standing gazing out of the window. I knew at once it was her because she hadn’t changed out of her shirt, which was bloody and ripped.
“She’s out there,” Estella said, without turning round. “She’s looking up at the schoolhouse.”
“Who is?” Martha asked, sitting up in bed.
“One of the Frozen Charlottes,” Estella said. “She must have got outside somehow.”
“The dolls are magic,” Bess said from her bed.
“The dolls are murder,” Estella responded. “They want to do terrible, awful things to us. They want to see us bleed and burn and rot in hell.”
“They do not!” Bess exclaimed. “They told me they wanted to be my friends – my best friends!” She started to cry.
“Why do you always have to spoil everything, Estella?” Martha demanded. “Why can’t you just be normal?”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Estella said. “The Frozen Charlottes will slaughter us all if they can. Every last one of us.”
Bess cried even harder.
“Shut up!” Martha cried. “God, Estella, you’re such a freak!”
“Martha, that’s enough!” I said, stepping into the room.
She fell silent at once, clearly startled by my presence.
“Bess, please stop crying. The dolls can’t hurt you,” I said. “Estella, come with me for a moment.”
She turned from the window and then walked slowly over. “What have I done wrong now?” she asked, giving me a defiant look.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Just follow me, please.”
We left the dormitory and I led the way down the corridor to the bathroom, ushering Estella inside and then closing and locking the door behind us.
“We need to get you out of that shirt and wash the blood off your back,” I said. “I’d like to help if you’ll let me.”
Estella gave an angry shrug, which I took as permission. In the hour or so since she’d been flogged, the blood had congealed and dried, sticking the shirt to her skin. I tried my best to be gentle, but there was no way of removing the shirt without re-opening the wounds, which immediately started to bleed again.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as Estella flinched.
She didn’t reply and I silently set about sponging away the blood, wincing at the sight of those angry red slashes.
“I saw what you did for Bess today,” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Estella replied.
“It’s all right, I won’t tell anyone. I thought it was a very kind thing to do.”
Estella said nothing. I rinsed out the sponge, watching the water turn pink in the basin.
“Estella, I need to tell you something,” I said. “I’ve seen Dolores, too. She was on the servants’ stairs on my first morning here.”
Estella looked up sharply, meeting my gaze in the mirror that hung on the opposite wall.
She looked doubtful, so I said, “I swear to you I’m telling the truth. I really did see her.” I proceeded to describe her appearance.
“She’s often there,” Estella said. “Dusting on the staircase. Humming. Sometimes I think she forgets that she’s dead. And she gets stuck in a loop. Going round and round and round. Over and over again.”
“Tell me about what happened when your brother died,” I said quietly. “And, Estella, I promise I’ll believe you this time.”
“He fell through the ice,” Estella said in a quiet voice. “I lay by the hole and stuck my arm into the water and waved it around but he never grabbed hold of my hand. He never grabbed hold of it. Then suddenly he was standing there on the other side of the lake. Talking to me. He told me not to worry and that he was all right.” She frowned. “I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t wet. It was like he’d never fallen through the ice at all. He disappeared into the trees before I could ask him and, when I got back to the house, he was in his bedroom. I could hear him talking to himself in there. John always used to talk to himself.”
“Only he wasn’t in his bedroom at all, was he?” I said.
“No,” Estella almost whispered. “John drowned in the lake when he fell through the ice. He was already dead when he spoke to me. No one believed that I had really seen him.”
Holding her arms, I gently turned her round to face me so I could look her straight in the eye. “I believe you,” I said. “I believe that you saw him and that you saw Dolores.”
Estella looked at me in silence before, finally, she said, “If you believe me about that, then do you believe me about the Frozen Charlotte dolls, too? Do you believe that they’re the ones who killed Whiskers?”
I gazed at her. “Estella, I don’t know what to think. I’ve never believed in ghosts my whole life. But since I arrived at this school, I’m not so sure. Dolls that move about on their own, though? That … I mean, that’s just madness.”
“They’re evil,” Estella said. “You should get rid of them.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if what you say is true, if the dolls really are haunted somehow, then I think they might know the answer to something I want to know. Something I need to know.”
I saw that closed door in my mind’s eye once again.
Charlotte says something bad happened in that room…
“You should get rid of the dolls,” Estella said again. “Before something really terrible happens.”
“I’ll keep them locked in the toy room,” I said. “I have the key and I won’t let it out of my sight this time. It’ll be all right, I promise.”
Estella simply shook her head at me. “You’ll see,” she said. “Everyone will see in the end.”
I fetched a nightdress for her to change into and then sent her to bed. When I got back to my room, I pressed my fingers against my aching temples, trying to make sense of it all. Could it be that the dolls were haunted, or was I simply allowing myself to get pulled into the disturbed tales of a small girl? My mind was in a whirl and I felt exhausted after the long and difficult day.
I tucked the key into the pocket of my nightdress before climbing into bed, where I was immediately dragged down into sleep.
Several hours later, I was woken by a scream.
Not a cry, or a moan, or a whimper.
An ear-splitting, bloodcurdling, hair-raising scream of agony and terror.
And it was coming from the girls’ dormitory.
Chapter Nineteen
Whiteladies – One month earlier
My trance sessions with Redwing became a nightly occurrence. Each time he would have me hold a Frozen Charlotte doll and stare into the red eyes of that devilish hawk, and then his mellow voice would lead me to some dark place where I lost all sense of self. I could never remember anything of what had happened during the sessions. Often, when he snapped me out of it, I would have new cuts or burns or bruises. On one occasion, my clothes were even ripped in several places.
“It was necessary to restrain you,” Redwing said, when I asked him about it. “You became overexcited.”
The sessions made me feel strange and tired and unlike myself. Mother still mostly kept to her room, but she soon found out that I had tak
en her place and was wretched about it, fairly begging me to tell Redwing I no longer wished to participate.
“It’s too late for that, Mother,” I told her. “He won’t allow me to stop now, even if I ask. I know he won’t.”
I still nurtured the faint hope that, eventually, Redwing would be satisfied and the trance sessions would stop. But it was a hope that grew smaller with each passing day. What had I got myself into and how on earth could I make it stop?
I occasionally thought of suggesting to Mother that we run away, but we had surrendered our tenancy of the townhouse after the wedding and we had no money between us, nowhere to go, no shelter in which to hide. Besides which, the law wouldn’t look kindly on a deserting wife, and I was sure that Redwing would use his wealth and power to track us down eventually.
One afternoon I was sitting in my bedroom, wearing my favourite cornflower-blue dress, staring into the mirror and wondering what on earth I could do to make my lot in life bearable. Then, without making any conscious decision, I found myself walking downstairs to Redwing’s study. The room was empty so I set to work going through his desk, rifling through his private papers. I don’t know quite what I expected to find. Something to blackmail him with perhaps – some way out of this dreadful nightmare.
The bottom drawer was locked but I forced it open with a letter opener, not caring that Redwing would know I’d been there. I found the drawer stuffed full of paper – sheets and sheets of it, all covered in writing. I grabbed a fistful and saw that every sheet was covered in an erratic, slashed scrawl, spreading all over the page in the most terrible mess, liberally stained with ink spots and splashes. It seemed that Redwing had made rapid progress with his automatic writing. There had been no attempt to write neatly or in lines. Some of it was, in fact, completely illegible. But there was the odd word that stood out starkly upon the page.