‘What do you think of these?’ I ask Angie, laying them out on the desk and moving the conversation to what I hope will be safer ground.
‘They’re great,’ she says in a warm voice, and I am relieved the awkward moment has passed. ‘Really colourful and engaging. I like this one.’ She points at a sepia photograph of a Victorian Lady Vavasour playing with her dog.
‘Yes, I like that, too. And this one.’ There’s another photograph of an Edwardian family picnic, where the dogs also feature. One looks very like Pippin, and the sight of it gives me a little pang.
Angie moves on to the wartime display. I have included one of the photos of Ralph and Adam in their RAF uniform, but I have found other pictures, too, of the Land Army and the Hall being used as a hospital. I’ve scanned a poster from 1942 and some quirky newspaper clippings. I think it looks pretty good.
I’m conscious that the material from the post-war period is thinner. I started with Ralph and Margaret’s wedding picture from 1950, as that seemed to mark the real start of the new era. I lay out Dosia’s photos and the ones I have taken from the Vavasour albums. There’s one of Michael and Felix that I like; Jasper and Fiona’s wedding; Joanna on a horse; George and Jasper with guns and Labradors.
Angie’s eye skims approvingly over them all until she comes to the photo of Peter Kaczka with the baby pheasants. She taps it with a polished pink fingertip. ‘Why on earth have you included this one?’
‘It’s a good picture,’ I say mildly. ‘It shows the estate isn’t just about the Vavasours.’
‘I don’t think you should use it. It gives the wrong impression.’
I stare at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean, Kate.’ Angie pulls the photo out and hands it firmly back to me. ‘It’s nice of you to think of it, but nothing you can do changes what Peter looked like. It’ll make people . . . uncomfortable.’
‘That’s their problem, isn’t it?’ That edginess is back in the air, but this time I don’t feel like backing down. ‘It wasn’t Peter’s fault that he didn’t look like everyone else. He had a place at Askerby just like them.’
‘Only thanks to the generosity of the Vavasours.’ There’s a little tic going at the corner of Angie’s mouth, and her dimple has quite disappeared. ‘Peter had somewhere to live and a job, and if you think Adam was able to support his family all those years without help, you’ve obviously never lived with an alcoholic. I never knew that Lord Vavasour – the old Lord Vavasour – was supporting us all those years until Babcia let it slip last year, but I don’t think we can repay them by associating Askerby with someone like Peter. I don’t think Lord and Lady Vavasour would like it, and frankly, I don’t think Babcia would want people staring at his picture and thinking of him as a freak.’
I’m puzzled now. It doesn’t sound as if Angie has any suspicion that Peter might have been Ralph Vavasour’s son, and if anyone were to suspect, surely it would be Angie? So perhaps I am wrong about that.
‘Dosia did say that she liked the idea of using Peter’s photo,’ I say, reluctant to give up on it just yet. It’s a great picture, and even if he wasn’t Ralph Vavasour’s son, he lived and worked at Askerby: why shouldn’t he be shown to have been part of its history?
But Angie isn’t having it. ‘Babcia’s confused,’ she says with finality. ‘If you asked her again today, she’d say something different. Forget the photo, Kate,’ she says. ‘It’ll only make trouble.’
What trouble? For whom? And why? Frustrated, I look down at Peter’s smile. There is something here that I don’t understand.
Briskly, Angie gathers up the other photos and makes a neat pile. ‘Shall I get these scanned for you?’ The dimple is back.
‘You’ve done a great job, Kate. George is going to be so pleased.’
Remember, remember. The constant drumming in my head is getting louder and more insistent with every day that passes. It’s like a terrible kind of tinnitus. Sometimes I can barely hear above the urgent hum, and I find myself frowning and leaning forward in concentration if I have to listen. At night I lie in bed and feel my blood beat and boom: Find him. Find Kit. Remember.
‘You look tired.’ Matt has fallen into the habit of meeting Felix and me at the school gates and walking slowly back to the Hall with us along the riverbank. He says that walking is good for the creative process. He says it gives the ideas tumbling around in his head time to rearrange themselves and settle.
I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but Felix and I both look forward to our walks together, and if Matt can’t make it for some reason the way home seems longer and duller somehow. Felix doesn’t even try to hide his disappointment then. I have to be bright and cheery and remind him that Matt is busy and isn’t obliged to spend any time with us, but the truth is, I know how he feels.
The last thing I want is to feel dependent on anyone, least of all someone who is to all intents and purposes a stranger, and one whose stay in Yorkshire is only ever going to be temporary at that. I can’t help thinking about what Angie said when she first told me about Matt: The guy’s from Hollywood. He wasn’t going to hang around in Askerby, was he? Still, I feel safe with Matt in a way I can’t explain. He’s in Askerby, but he’s not of it. He doesn’t belong here, and he is a reassuring reminder that there is a bigger world out there, one that doesn’t centre around the old Hall with its watchful windows and scurrying shadows.
It is a soft, still autumn day, with hazy sunshine and gnats drifting in clouds over the river, tiny specks that catch the light. The warmth in the air is shot through with the rich, mellow, composty scent of damp earth and dry leaves and rotting fruit. Felix is running ahead with the dogs, who have quickly cottoned on to the new routine of afternoon walks.
As ever, Pippin trails behind, stubbornly suspicious. She remembered Matt. The first time he called to her, she fawned over his shoes, wriggling with pleasure and turning submissively onto her back so that he could scratch her tummy. I admit it: I was jealous. I thought I might take advantage of her guard being down and get close to her, but the moment I stepped towards Matt she sprang onto her feet, hackles up, and growled at me.
‘What the—?’ Matt stared from Pippin to me and back. ‘What’s got into Pippin?’
I sighed. ‘It’s a long story.’
Now I study Matt under my lashes, wondering how much he will believe, how much I dare tell him. He’s right. I am tired. My face doesn’t come as a shock when I look in the mirror now, but there is still a bruised look around my eyes, and I am far too thin. My body is all jutting bones and sharp angles.
‘I haven’t been sleeping well,’ I tell him.
‘Is your leg still painful?’
‘It’s all right.’ I brush the pain aside. I am used to it now, used to the way an unwary movement can make it sink its hot teeth into my leg. ‘It’s not that. It’s more . . .’ The temptation to confide in him is a tangible thing, rising in me and pushing the words out of my throat before I realize I have succumbed. ‘I’m frightened.’ The relief of saying it, of admitting it to myself, is so huge that I feel light-headed.
‘Frightened?’ Matt’s brows snap together and he stops to face me. ‘What of?’
‘That’s the thing, I don’t really know.’ My eyes rest on Felix, who is buzzing in circles with his arms outspread while Molly leaps and barks around him. She’s unsure of the game but willing to have a go, anyway.
I’m carrying Felix’s coat, and I concentrate on folding it carefully over my arm. ‘I don’t know if it’s something in the house or something in me, or maybe it’s both—’ I flounder to a halt. ‘I’m not making sense, am I?’
‘Tell me,’ says Matt. ‘Tell me from the beginning.’
So I do. I tell him everything I remember since waking up in hospital as we walk along the riverside path, brambles and collapsing bracken catching at our legs, while Felix jumps in puddles and the dogs quarter the grass, jaunty tails wagging, uncaring of anything but the scents in their n
oses, and Pippin hangs back warily.
Matt listens as if what I have to say is normal. He doesn’t exclaim or interrupt, he just nods his head or gives me a little prompt – ‘Go on,’ ‘And then?’ – when I lose my nerve and falter.
He waits until I have told him about the hemlock, and how much I feared I might be losing my mind. And how much I fear now that I may be losing it again.
‘So you’re possessed?’ he says when I have stumbled to the end. He says it the same way he might ask if I had flu, with concern but not disbelief. Thank God, not disbelief.
I let out a breath on an embarrassed half-laugh. ‘Yes.’ It is such a relief to say it out loud that I say it again. ‘Yes. I’ve tried convincing myself that it’s just a way of coping with the trauma, like Oliver suggested, but the memories are too coherent, and they’re too real. Confabulation, or whatever he called it, might explain one memory, but not a sequence like this, and anyway why would I invent a memory set in Elizabethan times? It doesn’t make sense. But being possessed sounds even crazier, I know.’
‘Not to me,’ Matt says. He has been walking with his head down, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, but now he glances up. ‘Did you know I was with you when they dug up the body under the Visitor Centre?’
‘No,’ I say slowly. ‘No one told me that.’
‘We were having a walk, like today. It’s what we used to do, walk and talk.’
‘Devils that we are,’ I say with a lift of my brows, and he grins, a fast smile that cracks his face and sharpens the air.
‘Always,’ he agrees. ‘We’d finished shooting and it was just before I was due to go back to LA. We were being very grown up about it, but it made conversation sticky. There was so much I wanted to say to you, and so much I thought you really didn’t want to hear.
‘Anyway,’ he says, moving a bramble aside so that I can pass, ‘I guess we were both glad of the distraction. It had started to rain, and we were heading back to the Hall. Felix was fascinated by the diggers, and he insisted we went that way every day. But that day the excavator had stopped and there were a lot of people standing round, looking as if they didn’t know what to do.
‘You know what it’s like when everyone’s looking down a hole – you gotta look, too. So we did. There wasn’t much to see. Someone said they’d dug up a body and when I knew what I was looking for I could just see a few old bones. Could have been a bear for all I knew, but you took one look and fainted dead away. If I hadn’t been standing right beside you, we’d have been picking you out of the mud,’ Matt says. ‘As it was, by the time I’d carried you over to one of those portable cabins the contractors used as an office, you were coming round. You said all you remembered was terror, like a blanket dropped over your head, but then the feeling had gone. You were embarrassed about it.’
He pauses and glances at me again. ‘You really don’t remember any of that?’
I shake my head. ‘Nope, nothing.’
‘Well, if I had to guess, I’d say that’s when Isabel got into your head.’
I think about it. I suppose it does make sense. ‘But why me?’ I have a childish urge to stamp my feet. Haven’t I had enough to deal with, losing Michael and surviving a terrible accident? Why do I have to be haunted, too? I want to concentrate on Felix and getting better. I don’t want to be terribly afraid for a child who isn’t mine or to have my mind taken over by a woman who died hundreds of years ago. ‘Why not anyone else who was there? Philippa must have seen the bones, and Angie, and Fiona . . . all sorts of women . . . and none of them are haunted,’ I say with a touch of sullenness. ‘Why pick on me?’
‘Maybe you’re particularly susceptible or sensitive,’ Matt suggests. ‘Or maybe you’re the one who has most in common with Isabel.’
‘Oh, yeah, right. She’s been dead over four hundred years, and I live in the twenty-first century. We’re like twins.’
Matt ignores my sarcastic tone. ‘You both had husbands you loved very much, and young sons you would do anything for,’ he points out. ‘You were bereft when Michael died,’ he says evenly. ‘Everybody knew that. Maybe that made you vulnerable.’
‘Maybe.’ I can see Felix hopping impatiently up ahead and I start walking again. ‘I just wish I could remember what she wants me to do. Why can’t she rest?’
Chapter Thirty-three
‘Because she’s never been properly laid to rest,’ Matt says, as if the answer is obvious. ‘She killed herself, for whatever reason, so she can’t find peace until she’s resolved whatever trauma drove her to take her own life. I researched it when I was writing the script for The Tower. Nobody in Tudor times had any sympathy for suicides. Those who gave in to despair were believed to have succumbed to the Devil, and their spirits were supposed to return to haunt the living. They used to drive an iron-tipped stake through the hearts of the corpses to stop them walking again. I know,’ he says, seeing my horrified expression. ‘Pretty gruesome, right? It wasn’t what you’d call a compassionate age.’
I push that image aside. ‘That is if Isabel killed herself,’ I say. ‘I just don’t believe it.’
‘You told me she was worried about losing her mind.’ Matt is choosing his words with care. ‘Isn’t it possible that she did?’
I can feel my bottom lip jutting out mutinously. ‘What makes you so certain that’s what happened?’ I counter after a moment.
‘Because you were up that tower, too,’ Matt reminds me.
My hand creeps to my mouth as I realize what he is saying. I have been so convinced that I didn’t jump from the tower, I have even come to suspect that someone must have pushed me, although I can’t think of anyone who would do such a thing. But what if I did jump? What if Isabel made me jump? I remember how confused she was, how her memories seemed so out of kilter with everyone else’s. What if that confusion was the beginning of a madness that drove her up the tower to try to fly off? What if she took over my body as well as my mind?
What if she still could?
I chew at my bottom lip. ‘What do you think I should do, Matt? Should I try to get her bones reburied next to Edmund’s?’ I have no idea how I would go about arranging such a thing, but it must be possible.
He doesn’t answer immediately. ‘Do you think that’s what Isabel wants?’
No. The denial rings so loudly in my head that it’s hard to believe that Matt can’t hear it. And why am I pretending? I know what Isabel wants.
‘She wants me to find Kit,’ I say. ‘She wants me to remember, but I can’t!’ I clutch Felix’s coat to me. ‘She won’t leave me alone. She’s always in my head now. I’m afraid I’m going mad, just like her.’ I draw a shaky breath. ‘She wants me to do something, but I don’t know what, and I don’t know if I’m frightened because she is, or if I’m frightened because I’m talking about a woman who died four hundred years ago and seems to be communicating with me as if that’s somehow normal.’
Felix has seen that we have stopped again and runs back impatiently. ‘Come on!’ he cries.
We are following the river, round past the beach where Edmund pulled me down into the long grass, past the track which leads up to the moors, a track I have ridden a thousand times, it seems to me. And now the path turns off and Askerby Hall comes into view. Matt asks if I feel safe there, and I hesitate. To me the house feels untrustworthy. It is fixed into the landscape, but inside there is a wrongness that coats the air with an invisible sheen. It comes and goes, like a flickering light bulb that steadies the moment you reach towards it. Nobody else seems to notice it, certainly not the visitors who flock to the Hall every day, craning their necks to admire the intricate carvings, gasping at the magnificence of the long gallery, nudging each other when they spy the family photographs nestling between the heirlooms.
It is a strange life, half on show, half hidden behind the scenes. I can see the interest in the visitors’ eyes as they watch us step over the twisted red ropes or walk through doors marked Private. Do they imagine us behind t
he closed doors? Do they picture us living an idyllic life rooted in the security of generation after generation owning the house and land? They don’t know about the silences at the table, punctuated by awkward gobbets of conversation, or the slice and stab of Margaret’s cruel remarks.
I try to explain this to Matt. ‘It’s not that I feel unsafe, exactly, but the more I remember, the more repellent the house seems. Sometimes I think about running away, but it’s as if something won’t let me go. I’d thought I would leave after Christmas, and find somewhere just for Felix and me, but now, I don’t think I could, no matter how much I wanted to. I can make it as far as the village, but if I left the estate . . . it’s crazy, but I’m convinced that something would happen to me. The car would slide off the road, a tree would fall, something. If it was just me, I would risk it, but I can’t go without Felix and I can’t take the chance of him being hurt. I can’t explain how I know, but I can’t leave Askerby until I’ve done what I have to do here.’
‘And you’ve no idea what it is you need to do?’
I do, of course I do, but I’ve been trying not to think of it. ‘I thought at first it would just be a question of finding Kit in the records, but now I think it might be something to do with the tower.’
Dread uncurls in my stomach just saying the word. Every time I approach the Hall now, the tower leers at me. I imagine it leaning down like a great lizard, flickering out a long tongue, licking horror over me. My head spins and a great roaring fills my ears, and once again I am falling, falling. A stifling darkness rolls over me and my throat closes and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.
‘Kate.’ Matt puts out a hand and for a strange disembodied moment I see myself as if looking at a stranger, eyes huge and haunted in a chalk-white face, gulping for air. ‘Kate,’ he says again, snapping his fingers in front of me. ‘Kate, look at me.’
His words reach me through a fog of fear but I manage to focus on his face. He is looking straight into my eyes, and behind his glasses, his own are very steady.
House of Shadows Page 31