‘Someone?’
She wouldn’t have told him, were it not for the way his eyes appeared suddenly kinder and more understanding than they had to her before.
‘A woman,’ she said, recalling the brief flash that her torch had illuminated, the horrible sight that had made her run. If she concentrated, she could pick the image out as clear as day. ‘She was facing the wall. I only saw the back of her, and only for a second… But like I say, it was a trick of the dark. My own shadow, I expect.’
‘Why would she have been facing the wall?’
‘Exactly. It’s insane. There was nobody there. I dreamed it.’
Jack helped her move the chest. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t feel safer keeping it there?’ he teased, and she wanted to say something clever but didn’t. She’d thought he would tease her much more than this and he hadn’t, for which she was grateful.
‘I’m intrigued now,’ he said. ‘Think I should go in and find her?’
‘OK, OK, I’m an idiot.’
‘I’m not saying that. I wouldn’t want to sleep at Winterbourne on my own.’
‘Really?’ She made a face. ‘You don’t seem the type.’
‘What type?’
‘To be afraid of the dark.’
‘I’m not afraid of the dark,’ he said. ‘I might be afraid of what’s in the dark.’
A thought struck Rachel.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there is something you can help me with.’
*
The farce of last night’s panic settled ever more firmly on Rachel as they made their way down the servants’ corridor. To think she had skittered up here in fright twelve hours before seemed ridiculous. Who was that girl? Not her. Today the deserted quarters seemed sad rather than spooky, the antique bell box a bruised relic that clearly hadn’t sounded in decades. There was nothing intimidating about it, just dank, leaking walls and the stink of neglect. Another dip and they came to the cellar.
‘There it is,’ said Rachel. Jack went to the stunted door and pushed it.
‘Weird little thing, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Can you open it?’
‘Sure, if you don’t mind it getting wrecked in the process.’
She nodded. The door would have to be sacrificed. It pained her to demolish part of Winterbourne, however minor it was, but she needed to see behind it. She needed it brought to the sensible light of day just as the rest of the house had been.
Jack’s bulk made light work of it, and several shoves later the door broke through. He tore the remaining shards of wood from inside the frame and stood back.
‘Be my guest,’ he said.
Rachel crept inside with the torch. ‘Don’t you dare shut me in,’ she called back, as much to hear the comfort of his reply as for any other reason.
‘And what would I do that with?’
She looked about her. The chamber was as compact as the door had implied, an unevenly shaped room with a low ceiling. She couldn’t think what it had been used for, with space for maybe five or six huddled together. It was incredibly cold.
‘There’s nothing in here.’
‘Great, we can leave.’
‘Oh my god!’
Rachel’s own reflection had almost given her a heart attack – for her torch had crossed a large, oval standing mirror on the opposite wall. Because of the proportions of the room, her image, with its startled expression, had seemed obscenely close.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. A damn mirror – sorry.’
‘What’s a mirror doing in there?’
‘I have no idea. Help me lift it out?’
Jack climbed in and together they tilted the mirror from the wall. It was extremely heavy and an awkward shape to persuade through the access. Nonetheless Rachel felt sure that she didn’t want to leave it there: it was unnerving, the thought of a glass reflecting nothing but the dark, endlessly. ‘Let’s get it upstairs,’ she said. Jack took it from her and went ahead, and when they emerged into the hall he shut the door and spent a few moments mucking about with the catch.
‘There,’ he said, ‘little trick I learned. It’s locked. Feel better?’
‘I felt fine before.’ But she did feel better, a bit.
They examined the mirror, resting glass-out by the fireplace. It resembled a washed-up sea creature, something with many tentacles spewed up on a beach. Rachel had never seen anything so aggressively ornate in her life, and the eccentric shows and private viewings she’d attended made that a bold claim.
‘It’s monstrous,’ said Jack, but Rachel disagreed. There was a theatric beauty about the mirror that fitted utterly with Winterbourne. Its gothic frame was elaborate, bringing to mind a nest of snakes or else a tangle of foliage, parts of which appeared sharp enough to cause injury. The glass was blemished by age and the whole thing as tall and wide as she was. Like so much else at Winterbourne, she wished she could take it back to her gallery, imagined it as the centrepiece for a new exhibition.
‘It looks like it belongs to a wicked queen,’ she said.
Jack nudged her. ‘It does now.’
‘I don’t like myself in it. Don’t you think we look strange?’
‘This is just what we look like.’
But she thought they did look strange. It was curious to consider that the glass had lain hidden and unused all this time – who knew for how long? – and now it had finally opened its observant eye, here, in this hall, and was witnessing them as keenly as they witnessed it. ‘Do you think it belonged to Constance?’ said Rachel.
‘I doubt it belonged to her father. The brother was a bit alternative, though.’
Rachel turned to him. ‘Do you ever take anything seriously?’
‘Of course I do.’ He smiled at her. ‘The serious stuff.’
‘I ought to hang it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where.’
‘It’d look good on the fire. Nice bit of kindling, that frame.’
She folded her arms. ‘You’re suggesting I burn a mirror. How many years of bad luck would that be?’
‘This one looks like it’d curse you for eternity.’
She laughed, then went to the mirror and ran her fingers over the loops and spikes that made up its surround. ‘I just feel it wants to be hung, don’t you?’
‘I feel I want that cup of tea.’
They went to the kitchen to make it. Jack sat at the table.
‘Thanks for coming up,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m glad you did.’
‘I’ve no doubt.’ He drank his tea fast again, even though it had just been poured. ‘Bats and cellars and mirrors – it’s quite The Castle of Otranto up here.’
‘Since when have you read The Castle of Otranto?’ She grinned, then realised how she came across. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded patronising.’
‘Because it was patronising,’ said Jack. ‘Just because I don’t go in for art galleries.’
‘You could go in for both.’
‘I’d go in for yours.’
She blushed.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I came up because I figured you probably wouldn’t be here for much longer. In fact, I thought you might already have gone.’
‘Not that I’d ridden my bike into a ditch?’
‘Or that.’
‘As it goes, I’ve decided to stick around.’ She decided to be straight with him. ‘The reason I was exhausted last night was because I found some letters in de Grey’s study. Letters my grandparents wrote, secret letters that no one else was supposed to read, and now I can’t get them out of my mind. I’m trying to piece stuff together, my history, and this is just the beginning. I need to know what happened here and where my mother wound up. I need to know if she was OK.’
‘What about your job? What about your boyfriend?’
‘My job will survive. I have a good team.’
‘And your boyfriend?’
‘Shut up, Jack.’ But she smiled.
They were pulled from the moment by a polit
e knocking at the door. Rachel went to answer it, as Jack pulled on his coat and said, ‘I’d better get going.’
When she opened it, with Jack behind her, for a moment the person waiting there made no sense at all. It was a woman in a skirt suit with a satchel over one shoulder. Her hair was coiffed and her lips were pink and she looked hopelessly out of place and hopelessly optimistic. She must have come to the wrong place.
As if Winterbourne could be mistaken for the wrong place.
‘I’m Wanda Pearlman,’ the woman said, extending her manicured hand with a quiver of excitement. ‘I’m a director with Brightside Estates in Polcreath, and may I take this opportunity to say what a thrill and a privilege it is to be selling your home.’
Chapter 20
Cornwall, 1947
The morning after my supper with Henry Marsh, I am surprised to find a crude bouquet of wild flowers outside my bedroom door. My first illogical thought is that Henry himself has left them there, before I see the note accompanying them.
I’m sorry for being bad. I won’t do it again.
I love you very much.
Edmund.
I smile, a little mystified, and tuck the note into the pocket of my skirt. Downstairs, over breakfast, I murmur to him, ‘Did Mrs Yarrow put you up to this?’
The boy shakes his head and appears to me as he did when I first met him, utterly sweet and benign. ‘I picked the flowers myself,’ Edmund explains. ‘Well, Connie helped me.’ Across the table, Constance nods her assent. ‘I was a brat yesterday,’ he says, ‘a silly, spoiled brat, as Father would say. Will you forgive me?’
I squeeze his hand. ‘You’re already forgiven.’
Privately, though, I deem there nothing to forgive. My evening with Henry put it all in perspective. Over our meal, I couldn’t help but confide in the doctor about the children’s mischief, sharing with him Mrs Yarrow’s claim that they had tormented her before I arrived, Edmund’s vanishing that day in the mist, his conduct in class and then Constance’s attempt to put the frights up me with talk of spooks and ghouls.
‘What are you afraid of?’ Henry had asked me in the candlelight.
‘That it could be true.’
‘What could be true?’
He made me say it – and in saying it I heard how ludicrous it sounded. ‘That the poor woman before me,’ I faltered, ‘might still be at Winterbourne.’
‘As a ghost?’
‘Oh, I know, it’s madness.’
Henry had dabbed his moustache with a napkin. ‘It was a terrible shock when she died,’ he said. ‘Such a violent way to do it… But she was troubled, Alice, you must understand. Deeply troubled.’ He’d reached across for my hand, squeezing it before letting it go. ‘Did you know she was hurting herself? When she was brought in, she was covered in cuts and scratches, head to toe. Now, we doctors claim to be experts about the human body, but the mind is a new landscape entirely. And it would stand to reason that an event like that would affect small children. How could it not?’
‘I quite agree,’ I’d said, ‘and to lose their mother, as well. They must expect me to disappear at any moment. All their other carers seem to.’
Henry had placed his cutlery together; I could tell by his body language that he wasn’t comfortable talking about Laura. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ he asked.
‘Do you?’
‘I’m a man of science. Of course I don’t.’
I couldn’t answer the question myself. All I knew was that I had to be privy to every part of the de Greys, to see what they saw, to know what they knew, to be inseparable from them in that way families are, all of us together, facing whichever adversity came our way. I wanted to be integral to them, for them to depend on me, to need me, to never doubt me nor I them. The children had appealed to me, and so had Jonathan. They had shown me how I important I was and the significance of the role I filled. Right from the start when the twins had sketched me in a wedding dress – ‘You’d make a beautiful bride’ – they had been communicating a yearning they were too young to understand. But I understood. It was my duty to return their devotion.
Edmund taps my arm, drawing me back to the present.
‘May we get down from the table, Alice?’
‘Of course you may,’ I say. ‘Now go and get ready for class. Nine a.m. sharp.’
I wonder, as I watch the children obediently leave the kitchen, whether Henry has ever lost anyone close to him – and whether, when the stakes are high, it’s as easy to be a person of science. But I must admit that the doctor’s good sense has settled my mind. He agreed that the twins’ playing up was a consequence of their situation. Between he and I, Winterbourne was an extreme sort of place, Captain de Grey was an extreme sort of man, and with the upheaval of the past few years it was a small miracle they hadn’t taken leave of their senses altogether.
‘The best you can be is a constant,’ Henry had advised, ‘and be sure to stand your ground. That’s the way with children: they’ll try to get the better of you but they don’t really want to manage it. They’re testing you, Alice, that’s all.’
*
For the rest of the morning they don’t test me at all. Edmund and Constance are exemplary students: keen, interested, sweetly engaged. I return the girl’s project to her on her happiest memory at Winterbourne, with my comments at the foot: Thank you for sharing this with me, Constance. It’s a wonderful memory. To Edmund, following his outburst, I have only reassurance that he might complete the same task for next time. ‘What did you write about, Connie?’ he asks, a touch sheepishly.
‘Mummy,’ she replies. ‘Mummy in the mirror.’
He nods, as if this needs no elaboration. To be frank, I am not convinced that Constance’s memory is altogether accurate – after all, she was three when she last saw her mother alive. But the way her little paragraph conjured the image of Laura de Grey brushing her hair in the mirror bewitched me utterly, not least because it gave me those physical details about Laura that I craved. Constance wrote about her ‘lashings of black hair’ and her ‘pale, lovely face’ and the skin that was ‘like powder to touch’. She wrote about Laura’s red lips and green eyes. The mirror, I assume, had been hanging in the de Greys’ bedroom, and it is so easy to picture the wife at her dressing table, with Constance looking admiringly on from behind, that it is almost as if I am remembering a scene of myself from a long time ago.
Stop daydreaming, Alice.
‘It was an excellent piece,’ I say, smiling at the girl, ‘and well written.’
‘Connie wants to be a writer when she’s grown up,’ says Edmund.
‘She’d make a very good one.’
‘She likes to make things up. Don’t you, Connie?’
Constance nods. The children watch me serenely. And then I am struck by an idea. ‘Come outside,’ I tell them, ‘come on! Coats on, wrap up warm, here we go.’ The children are surprised and pleased to get out of the drawing room. I clap my hands to hurry them along, as if afraid that to pause will change my mind.
Minutes later we are at the stables. Storm is chewing lazily on a clump of grass and the solid, languid sound of her hooves as she approaches the door is enough to make Constance squeal with excitement. It’s a cold October day and we can see our breath in the air, bite-sized clouds. The sky is grey and the sea is grey and there is barely a line in between. Warm steam rises from the hay in the stable.
‘Father never lets us come!’ says Constance. ‘Can I stroke her? Can I?’
Storm puts her patient head over the door and Constance reaches to touch it.
‘Hello, Storm,’ she whispers, as the horse grunts through its nostrils, a hot, whickery expulsion. ‘Do you remember us?’
‘I think she does,’ I say, pleased to see them together. If Laura loved this horse, and she loved the children, then surely it is right that this happens.
Behind, Edmund scuffs his feet on the ground. I recall what his father told me about his dislike of animals, but I wonder how much
he was ever encouraged.
‘Edmund,’ I say, ‘would you like to stroke Storm?’ He shakes his head. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask. ‘Don’t you like horses? There’s no need to be afraid. See how gentle she is! She won’t hurt you. Look, come here, that’s it—’
‘Will you ride her, Alice?’ Constance interrupts.
‘Goodness, no! I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘But she wants to be ridden. I can tell. She hasn’t been ridden in years.’
‘I hardly think I’m the person to take her out.’
‘Who else will do it?’ Constance turns to me, and smiles the smile that only I see: one that speaks of the deep affection she has for me. ‘Please, Alice, will you? Mummy would have liked you to. Mummy would ask you, if only she could. It would make us so happy, as well, to see Storm out on the moors again, just like old times.’
‘Miss Miller.’
I start at the deep voice. It rings deep in the cool, vibrating air. Captain de Grey stands before us; he must have been watching from a high window, or perhaps he followed us. Sometimes I feel him following me, if not his body then his gaze; I feel his eyes on my back when he thinks I don’t realise.
‘Good morning, Captain.’
The children shrink, afraid. Indeed, in the quiet, still courtyard with Winterbourne soaring behind, the captain cuts a menacing figure. He is dressed darkly, as ever, and his hair is growing wildly past the collar of his long coat. It strikes me how tall he is, far taller than me. His eyes appear shockingly blue.
‘May I have a word,’ he says.
‘Certainly. Children, run along. Resume with Tennyson, I’ll be in shortly.’
Once we are alone, he says, ‘I would rather the children did not come here.’
‘Why not?’
I have spoken out of turn. His expression confirms it.
‘Forgive me, Captain, I should never have—’
‘Because this was their mother’s place,’ he says coldly. ‘Laura loved to come to the stables. The twins don’t understand. It’s painful for them.’
The Woman in the Mirror: Page 15