House of Shadows

by Pamela Hartshorne

  ‘That’s the long gallery.’ Philippa has realized I am not following her and retraces her steps impatiently. ‘The visitors love it.’

  ‘I thought I saw someone,’ I say.

  ‘I doubt it. The house is closed today.’ She puts her head through the doorway and looks up and down. ‘Nope. Empty. You must have imagined it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say slowly. ‘I must have done.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Philippa walks briskly along the corridor, and I limp after her. I keep glancing over my shoulder, as if I will catch a glimpse of whoever was waiting for me in the long gallery, as if I will see them beckoning me: Where are you going? Come back!

  ‘Are you coming?’ Philippa huffs out a sigh of irritation.

  I make myself turn my back on the doorway and go on. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m a bit slow.’

  The stairs to the other floors are steeper than the main staircase, and tucked away from the main rooms. The nursery, it turns out, is right at the top of the house, a relic of the days when children were handed over to the servants, who produced them properly scrubbed and polished at the appointed time.

  ‘Were you exiled up here when you were little?’ I ask Philippa as I pause for breath again in the turn of the stairs. My leg is aching badly, pain jabbing like red-hot pokers at my thigh, but I am not going to give up.

  ‘Of course. The nursery has always been up here, so that’s where we were.’ Philippa turns to carry on up the stairs, ignoring the fact that I am still breathing heavily and badly in need of a rest. ‘If you haven’t already realized it, Ma and Pa both worship at the shrine of “the way things have always been done”. The past is a religion at Askerby. You would never accept it before,’ she says over her shoulder, ‘but take it from me, it’ll be much easier all round if you do.’

  I grip the banister and push on my stick to haul myself up the next set of steps. I think about how envious Angie sounded of Philippa’s childhood, how idyllic it had seemed to her watching from outside. Distant parents, banishment to a nursery and a worship of tradition don’t seem very idyllic to me. ‘It doesn’t sound as if you accept it.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just me being contrary.’ She hunches a shoulder, faintly defensive. ‘I do find it suffocating sometimes, but Askerby is my home. I like knowing that the house has been here so long, and that so many traditions remain unchanged. I like being the Hon. Philippa Vavasour,’ she says with a challenging look over her shoulder. ‘I like thinking about how many daughters and sisters of earlier Lord Vavasours have lived here before me. Yes, I think we should change. I hate how we always have to pretend, how we can’t say what we really think or feel because that’s “not done”, but at the same time, if you told me you wanted to divide the Hall into executive apartments or put a satellite dish on one of the towers, I would fight you all the way.’

  Her vehemence catches me unawares. ‘Hey,’ I say, holding up the hand that isn’t clenched on the stick, ‘it won’t be anything to do with me.’

  ‘But it will,’ she says. ‘Felix is the next Lord Vavasour, and what he thinks will be up to you. Whatever happens, I’ll only ever be here on sufferance.’

  There’s no mistaking the bitterness in her voice now, but before I have time to reply, Philippa is marching down the corridor and brusquely opening a door at the end. I am still struggling to catch up when I hear her say: ‘Angie, Kate’s back.’ And then, carelessly: ‘Mummy’s here, Felix.’

  As I reach the door I see a small boy scrambling to his feet, his face alight with anticipation. Felix is four. I know this because I’ve been told. He has the Vavasour blue eyes and fair hair. It’s obvious straight away that he is a bright, engaging child, but my disappointment at the sight of him is so acute that for a moment I can’t breathe. I wanted so much for him to be the child I’ve been searching for, but he isn’t.

  He’s not my boy. My hand trembles on my stick as I lean against the door frame, and I force myself to smile. Whatever I feel, I cannot hurt this little boy by refusing to acknowledge him. ‘Hello, Felix,’ I say.

  Felix has started to run towards me, but at the sound of my voice he stops, and seems to look at me properly for the first time. ‘You’re not my mummy!’ he says, outraged.

  ‘Felix!’ This from Angie, who has been playing on the floor with him and now scrambles to her feet.

  ‘That’s not my mummy,’ says Felix stubbornly, and I am oddly relieved. At last here is someone who thinks as I do.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Felix.’ Philippa manages to sound both sharp and bored at the same time. ‘Of course it’s Mummy.’

  Felix’s bottom lip is trembling but he stands his ground. He knows what he knows. ‘No!’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Dismayed, Angie hurries to kneel beside him and puts her arms around him. ‘He’s just a little confused.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘I’ve been away a long time, and I look different.’

  Felix’s face is crumpling in distress. ‘I want Mummy!’ he cries, and when Angie tries to comfort him, he pulls away and hurtles across the room towards me. But he doesn’t want to kiss me. He wants to punish me for not being the mother he’s been waiting for.

  ‘You’re not Mummy!’ he shouts at me, beating at my legs with his small fists and he is stronger than he realizes, or I am weaker than I do, because I stumble and almost fall. ‘Go away!’ he screams, his voice rising into hysteria. ‘Go away, go away! You’re not Mummy!’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Philippa rolls her eyes. ‘I guess Ma was right after all. I hate it when that happens. It might be better to leave him for now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, as Angie pulls Felix from me. She picks him up but he arches away, his face red and screwed up as he screams his fury and disappointment.

  ‘Shh, now, sweetheart,’ Angie croons to him. ‘It’s all right. Angie’s here.’ Leave him to me, she mouths over Felix’s head.

  All right.’ I’m shaken and not sorry to leave, although I feel guilty for walking away. But what can I do? I can’t comfort Felix when I’m not his mother. Felix knows that, and I know that. Why can’t everyone else see it?

  ‘Well, that was a disaster,’ says Philippa, shutting the door on Felix’s screams. ‘At least Ma will be able to say “I told you so”.’ She gives me a cursory glance. ‘Perhaps you’d better have that rest after all. You look done in.’

  ‘Yes, I think I’ll lie down for a bit,’ I say. I need to be on my own. I’m in turmoil and my leg is hurting viciously.

  Philippa glances at her watch. ‘You’ve got an hour before lunch, but get going as soon as you hear the gong. Granny hates it when anyone’s late.’

  ‘I’m not that hungry,’ I say. ‘I might skip lunch.’

  ‘Oh. Okay then. I’ll tell Ma.’ She nods briskly. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  Obviously relieved at having got rid of me, she heads off down the corridor.

  ‘Philippa?’ I say, and she stops and turns impatiently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s my room?’

  My room is far away from the nursery, down a flight of stairs and along another corridor. I am somewhere in one of the wings of the house. I’m not sure what I expect, but it is not this pleasant, sunny room. There is a four-poster bed, with chintz bed hangings, and an old-fashioned dressing table with frothy skirts. A pale, deep-pile carpet and an antique table, polished to an intimidating shine. A massive mahogany wardrobe. A chest of drawers in the same polished wood. It is clearly a guest room; it smells of polish and clean linen, of old soap. It doesn’t smell like me.

  There is a scatter of jewellery on the dressing table, mostly earrings and beaten silver bangles, and an iPad on the bedside table. I know about iPads. Angie has one and I remember using it in hospital. Mine is charging. I flip it open and see that I have three messages. I slide my finger across the screen to unlock it, but it wants to know a password. With everything else I have lost, does it think I remember a password?

  Now I real
ly want to know what the messages say. Frustrated, I put the iPad down. It’s the same with the phone I find on the mantelpiece. It seems I am very security conscious.

  Several framed photographs stand on the dressing table, mostly of Felix as a baby and toddler, and there are a couple on the bedside table too. I pick them up and examine them. One I have seen before: it shows Michael and Felix and me on a beach somewhere. There is another one of Michael sitting in a pavement cafe. He looks relaxed, his arm thrown over the back of a chair, a glass of wine in front of him.

  Sighing, I put the last frame down and stand, leaning on my stick and looking around the room, seeking some familiarity, some sense that this room really belongs to me. But all I get is that old sense of urgency: Remember, remember.

  I limp over to the window. A deep window seat with cushions is built into the bay. When I kneel on it I can open one of the windows and look out over a swathe of grass to some trees, and behind them, to the moors that swell up towards the sky. Something stirs in my memory . . . something . . . but I can’t grasp it. It shimmers and flashes out of sight, like a trout in a river; a glimpse of something that has gone before you can fix on it.

  I wonder if it is another memory of Edmund? I hope so. I take out those that I have already, as if to polish them and turn them round in the sun, examine them from every angle. Every moment I remember of him is perfectly clear, and the truth of each hums in my bones. But none of them makes sense in this world I find myself in, where they call me Kate and tell me I belong.

  A world where my child doesn’t recognize me. Where my dog growls at me.

  Am I Kate or am I Isabel?

  Where is Edmund? And where is my son, whose name I don’t know but of whose existence I am certain?

  I feel precarious, balanced on the edge of something I don’t understand. Carefully, I turn and sit on the window seat facing the room, my hands flat on the cushion. I am holding on. It feels as if the house is turning around me, circling me, wondering what I am doing here, and I blink, disorientated by the sense of unseen shadows shifting and plucking at the edge of my vision. And I think about the presence at the top of the stairs, the way I felt it had been waiting for me. Where are you going? it had demanded as I followed Philippa to find Felix. Come back!

  The silence in the room is dense, watchful. All I can hear is my shallow breathing, the suck and sigh of it echoing in my ears. I want to ask, Is there anybody there? but I can see that there isn’t. Of course there isn’t. The room is empty. Still, I can’t shake the conviction that there is a warning hovering in the trembling air.

  The piping on the cushion is digging into my palms, and I make myself relax my hands. I must get a grip. I try to recall what Oliver Raine said. My memories as Isabel aren’t real; they are snatches of experience that I have jumbled together and made into a story, that is all. But his theory doesn’t seem so convincing now that I am back at Askerby, where I can sense the memories crowding the air, beckoning. They don’t feel invented; they feel real, they feel present, so close that I can almost touch them.

  Remember, remember.

  ‘But I can’t remember!’ The words are wrenched out of me. They jar the silence and echo disturbingly in my head.

  What is happening to me? I draw a shaky breath and make myself examine the situation carefully. I am Kate Vavasour, and I live at Askerby Hall. I jumped off the roof of this house and I cannot remember anything of my life before that. The only memories I have appear to belong to someone completely different, someone who lived at Askerby more than four hundred years ago. But I am imaginative and highly strung, I’m told. I might be making it all up.

  Am I making Isabel up, or is she real? And if she is real, what does she want of me?

  Remember.

  My son. There is something I must do for my son. I have seen Felix, but I am not the mother he wants, and he is not the son I need. But I keep thinking about that awful scene with Felix, and I rub my chest where a niggling ache, a pebble, small and hard and uncomfortable, is lodged. Before I met him, he was just a face I didn’t recognize in a photo. Now he is real. I keep seeing his face, the betrayal in the blue Vavasour eyes, the terror and fury as the small fists pounded me.

  I don’t remember him, I don’t love him, not yet, but he is just a child, and my heart cracks to imagine what it is like for him to look at me and see not the mother he longs for but a stranger, an alien who looks right but feels wrong. I must find a way back to him, even if it means letting go of my longing for another child.

  No, no, no! My head rings with a wild desolation. No, I need to know that he is safe. But I close my mind firmly to it. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I mustn’t lose control. I mustn’t tell anyone about the memories that I have. I must stay calm.

  ‘I am Kate,’ I say out loud. It doesn’t feel true, so I say it again. ‘I am Kate.’

  Exhausted, I sleep all afternoon. That evening, there is a knock on my door, and when I call ‘Come in’, a fresh-faced girl carries in a tray and sets it by my bed. ‘Lady Vavasour thought you might be tired,’ she said. ‘She asked the cook to send you an omelette so you didn’t have to go downstairs tonight.’

  I drag myself up against the pillows, knuckling my eyes. I have to admit that the last thing I feel like doing is eating with the Vavasours tonight. I’m not ready to face the family yet. ‘That was kind of her,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

  The omelette is delicious and I feel better for having eaten something, but after sleeping all afternoon I am restless that night. I lie in bed and watch the sky slowly deepen to violet and then to a dark blue spangled with blurry stars. I have left the window open, and I can smell the grass outside. The trees rustle and sigh in the light breeze that blows down from the moors, and the night is full of little chirrups and squeaks, of hoots and squeals and, once, a low cough.

  It feels very late before I fall into a fitful sleep, and I’m troubled by a familiar sense of being dragged one way and then another, of hands reaching for me and not knowing if they want to pull me close or push me away. At one point I find myself blinking into the darkness with no idea of where I am. The night is dense, deep, but there is someone there, I can tell, stirring the darkness, slipping through the shadows. I am sure that I feel the brush of a hand against my cheek.

  ‘Edmund?’ I murmur, then wake properly, my heart jerking.

  The silence is absolute, crushing. That is wrong, surely? Old houses creak and sigh and settle. Radiators tick, pipes gurgle, and beneath it all, the low hum of electricity and sleepers shifting and sighing. But in this room there is nothing. It is as if every sound has been sucked out of it until all that is left is the pulse pounding in my ears.

  It takes me a very long time to work up the courage to switch on the bedside lamp. The harsh light makes me throw an arm over my eyes to shield myself from the horrifying conviction that everything in the room is jumping at me. When I lower it at last, I see that all is as it should be. The iPad is on the bedside table, the hairbrushes are on the chest, my skirt is slumped over the back of the chair where I threw it earlier, too tired to hang it up. There is nothing out of place, and yet everything seems alien and threatening. My eyes skitter from the chair to the curtains, from the chest to the door to the wardrobe, certain that each is bunched and ready to leap at me with its strangeness.

  My son, I must find my son. It’s not really a voice, more a vibration in the air, an urgency that lifts the hairs on the back of my neck and reaches deep inside me to twist and clench. Find my son.

  Chapter Twelve

  Used to hospital hours, I wake early, brushing away the bad dreams like cobwebs from my face. It takes me a few moments to remember where I am. Askerby. I look cautiously around the room that seemed so menacing last night. In the pearly light, it is stolid, still. Harmless.

  As always when I wake up, I examine my memory: is there anything there? Images flicker and flutter just out of reach, but I can’t grasp them. They feel closer than usual, that is all I
can say. It is as if they are coming to the boil, slow bubbles rising, almost there, but not quite.

  Pushing back the covers, I ease myself out of the bed and grope for my stick so that I can limp to the window. Outside, it is very early. The sun sends long, low shadows slanting across the garden like bars and in the stripes of light the grass shines silver with dew. The stillness is broken only by a rabbit loping across the lawn, but even that freezes, as if sensing my gaze, before darting into the shrubbery.

  Beyond the trees, I see the moors soaring to the horizon, the morning sun turning their tops to gold. My heart lifts at the sight of the open hills, beckoning with promise. In spite of the jabbing pain – all those stairs yesterday were a mistake – I feel less vulnerable this morning, more determined. I can sense the memories creeping closer. It is like playing grandmother’s footsteps. If I turn and look for them, they freeze. I need to catch them out, pretend that I’m not looking for them, and then whirl before they have a chance to vanish.

  But at least they’re there, ready to be snatched back if I am quick enough and clever enough. That makes me feel better. I am sick of waiting passively for my mind to fill in the missing pieces. There are things I can do. I can find out who I am, and what took me up the tower that day, what was so terrible that I threw myself off it. There is part of me that doesn’t want to remember that, and another part that knows I won’t be able to move on and change until I do.

  But first I need to get better. Mary, the physio, has promised that we will start walking outside soon, but for the next few days I am confined to the house. She won’t be pleased when she hears about all the stairs I climbed yesterday, but I had to do it. I had to see Felix for myself, and I could not send for him to be brought down to me as if he had been naughty. Besides, the thought of that terrible scene taking place in front of Fiona and the other Vavasours makes me cringe. Far better to have hauled myself up the stairs, even if my leg is on fire now.