The Fire Child

by S. K. Tremayne

  ‘Come on, Rachel. Do this.’ I am talking to myself.

  Yes, you are.

  Turning the doorknob, the bleak and neglected stairs yawn below me. I flick an old-fashioned switch on my right – and the damp light feebly illuminates the unpainted steps. I switch the torch on too, in case the antique basement lights give out, which happens often.

  Down I go, into that musty and horrible dream of corridors, throwing as many light switches as possible. Past the Gun Room. Past a Game Larder. Past a scuttling noise of mice, or rats, on my left, which speeds the pulse. Then I stall, and peer into the murk.

  These corridors go on for ever. Perhaps some of them, somewhere, actually link up with the deeper tunnels under Morvellan. I imagine a map of these tunnels: it would resemble the grey bones of a hand, seen in the dark of an X-ray. A hand that reaches, desperately, beneath the sea.

  At the next corner I can smell dust and ancient dirt, yet also a lingering aroma of spice. It is a last dying hint of the life once lived down here in the great kitchens of Carnhallow House.

  Here and now, in my mind, the place fills – with real ghosts, with bustle and cheer, from a century back. I can hear the vivid chatter of footmen in livery fetching drinks and ices, then the laughter of pretty housemaids from Pendeen and Hayle, St Erth and Botallack. Sweating cooks in aprons, boys turning spit roasts, someone writing careful menus: Côtelletes d’Agneau à la Macedoine, Poulets à la Langue de Boeuf. Upstairs I imagine the Kerthens, decorously and contentedly eating the endless food delivered from these basements. The suckling pigs. The golden soufflés. The jugged hare, boiled in its own blood.

  Now it is all dead. The romance is over.

  My torch-beam, added to the gloomy light from the motionless bulbs, leads me past the Butler’s Pantry. I can hear muted squeals. Bats, I imagine, or rodents.

  Turning the corner, I come to the Still Room. The door is open. I’ve never seen that before. What’s more: the boxes aren’t there. Those large cardboard boxes, with Nina written on them. I’ve seen them here half a dozen times, sitting on the grubby tiles. I’ve never felt the need to open them before. But now I do – they’ve gone.

  This disturbs me.

  Perhaps Cassie moved them, perhaps someone else. Pushing at the next door along, I peer inside. This dismal space is so sooted with dirt it appears to be charred, like there was a minor fire, extinguished by the damp. It is also entirely empty.

  The next door is very stiff and requires a serious shunt. Then another. Once I am inside, the room seems bigger, more promising. Shapes of furniture loom. But the light switch doesn’t work, so I have to use my torch.

  The beam of light glitters on a pile of enormous beaked skulls: turtle skulls, perhaps, for turtle soup. Then a narrow arched window of stone, blinded by bricks, probably a thousand years old, from the monastery that underlies everything.

  A venerable chest of drawers dominates the far wall. I have to step over piles of stinking carpet to reach it. I test the first drawer. It is so stiff it takes a proper tug to slide it open. Brisk, determined, I rifle through the contents, burgling the family history.

  Everything is in here, everything and nothing: black-edged Victorian letters. Mourning lockets with curls of faded blonde hair. A pair of ancient gloves, some broken chessmen. A box of antique silver buttons with the Kerthen crest.

  Nothing.

  The next drawer down is slightly more rewarding: ink stands, pen wipers, what look like seventeenth-century mining deeds. With my torch-beam slanting down, I skim-read the papers. The most impressive is a handwritten letter from the Lord Lieutenant of Truro to Lord Falmouth, confirming – I think – the Kerthens’ purchase of Wheal Arwenack.

  The bottom drawer contains a sheaf of faded photographs of unknown relations. They resemble the framed photos hung along the New Hall. One by one, I examine them. The people are stiff and unsmiling. Standing men and sitting women, posed proudly and formally in front of their mines.

  I recognize Morvellan, it is so distinct. There are barefoot bal maidens in headscarves toiling in the background; several are squinting curiously at the distant camera, some are going about their work. A man tugs a tray of rocks with straps over his shoulder, like a beast of burden.

  I am sure it would have been horribly noisy: the deafening sound of the mine stamps, crushing the ores, the maidens hammering away at the deads. Yet the ambience of the photo is oppressively muted. Stifled and Victorian.

  Everyone in this photo is now quiet. Because they are quietly watching me.

  Another photo shows Levant mine, and still another, Wheal Chance. All of them with Kerthens in front. See what we own. This is ours. All of this.

  Something snags. I go back to the first photo.

  There is a child in the unnoticed centre of this image of the grand Victorian Kerthens, at the apex of their wealth, stiffly posed in front of Morvellan Mine. A girl in a white dress, with tiny black boots, laced up tight, is sitting on a little chair right next to a vigorously moustached, stern-faced man in his forties, who utterly ignores her.

  The resemblance of the girl to Jamie is uncanny. The enormous eyes. The crow-dark hair. But what truly pierces me is the girl’s expression. She looks terrified. For no particular reason. Her mouth is half-open, as if she is silently screaming. But perhaps she is trying and failing to smile, in this awful place, with the shrieking stamps behind her, the children with arsenic sores all around.

  It is all here. The noble and wicked history of the Kerthens.

  Yet I am learning nothing. Stepping back from the cabinet, my torch-beam shines at random. On the boxes, with Nina written on the side, lodged behind the door. Someone has moved the boxes into this forbidding room. Cassie perhaps. Or Juliet. Maybe it was Jamie – sifting stuff, trying to work out what happened to his mother: why she is still alive, and sitting in a bus, waiting for Christmas, getting ready for the big day. I can hardly blame him for his confusion.

  I step up to the enormous cardboard boxes. They are not sealed.

  Balancing my torch on the nearest shelf, I open a cardboard flap. The box is full of clothes. Reaching in, I peel away the first dress. It shimmers in my torch-beam, crimson and turquoise, satin and silk, very lovely. Further down in the box there are skirts, scarves, more soft and flimsy dresses. There are perfume bottles here. Chanel. The perfume of a dead woman, the scent of a body my husband so loved to touch.

  I have to see what’s in the next box. I want to get this done. Urgently, and slightly trembling, I rip the lid open.

  As I reach in, a noise freezes me. A human noise, from outside the room.

  I wait. Tensed so hard, my thigh muscles hurt. My hands shake.

  It is the unmistakable creak of old wooden stairs.

  Someone is coming down the steps. They will find me, here, rifling through a dead woman’s possessions. A thief caught in the act.

  The panic is a metallic taste in my mouth. I think I can hear the sound of someone breathing especially quietly. This makes it all worse. This is someone trying not to be heard.

  It cannot be Jamie: he is with Rollo. Cassie is away for the night, staying with friends. Juliet is socializing.

  I am alone. And yet, tonight, in the basements of Carnhallow, I am not alone.

  The footsteps get nearer, passing down the corridor outside. Then they stop. At the door to this room.

  I stare in pulsing fear. Who is trying to frighten me? Who is coming for me? In my mind I see Jamie, I see Nina Kerthen, I see that little girl at the Levant, with her evil little boots, deformed but skipping, pointing at the sea, pointing to the wastes of water, look look look look look. The girl that frightened me so much I hugged Jamie close.

  ‘Who is it?’ I say, my voice hoarse. ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’

  No one replies. I am trapped. Cornered in this room with the fragrant dresses, and the shouting little girl in the photograph.

  ‘Stop it,’ I say. ‘Who is this? Nina?’

  I am calling out to a dea
d woman.

  The door opens. I shine my torch.

  It’s Juliet.

  She gazes at me, her face snared in my torch-beam. ‘Rachel.’

  I try to stammer a reply. And fail.

  She smiles. ‘Thank God. I came back early and I thought we had a ghost. The house is so empty. It’s amazing we haven’t been burgled! Are you going through Nina’s things?’

  I am stumped. What do I say? I have no choice. ‘Oh God, yes. No. Yes. I’m sorry. But I am.’

  She looks at me, then at the boxes. Then at me again. Her expression is inscrutable in the gloom. ‘They’re fascinating. You are not alone. I think Jamie goes through them.’

  A pause.

  ‘He does?’

  She smiles, and puts her hands in the pockets of her old cashmere cardigan. As if this is a normal conversation, over camomile tea or Beefeater gin in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh yes. That’s why I asked Cassie to move them in here, make it a little harder to find. It’s not good for him. I’d like to throw them all out but David won’t let go, won’t let go of the memory.’

  ‘But—’ I fight to speak. ‘But …’

  ‘But who can blame Jamie for trying to understand the past? Exactly, dear. All these puzzles. Aren’t they the thing? Nina everywhere, everyone’s here, no one has really gone. Sometimes I think I can hear the miners, singing, when the wind goes through these basements. They used to have red faces from iron oxide.’

  I feel an urge to share, to tell this woman, my only possible ally in Carnhallow, what I saw. Someone very like Nina. On a bus. But I can’t. Not yet. Not yet.

  ‘Have you seen all the black dresses? Marvellous, all the little black dresses.’ Juliet’s smile is indulgent, dreamy. Perhaps she has been on the port already. ‘They were the loveliest, I think. Yet so expensive.’ She sighs. ‘But then, as David always says, death is the price we pay for beauty. Do pick one up, do try it against yourself.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You are Nina’s size. Very similar, apart from the hair. Take up one of her dresses, measure it against yourself, it’ll be fun.’

  She is definitely drunk. But I don’t mind that. It means she might forget this episode.

  Obediently reaching into a box, I pull out one of the dresses. Shimmering, and black. Then I lay it over myself, like I am casually trying it for size in a store.

  ‘Oh yes!’ Juliet laughs, delightedly. ‘You are Nina! Surely her. Oh yes.’ Her laugh fades. And a quickening sadness takes over. ‘Well, I must go, but do carry on. There are books in there as well. Goodnight. Please remember to shut the door tight to stop little Jamie getting in. We have to save Jamie. Jamie is everything. He is the reason for everything.’

  And that’s it. She turns and leaves, as if we have just met in the Drawing Room and discussed the rose garden. I stand here, stilled, for half a minute, trying to decipher her slurred sentences. But it is hopeless. And there are more boxes. I want to get this search concluded and flee upstairs.

  The second box contains lots of documents and files. Figures and quotes. Most of it – all of it? – contracts and letters relating to the restoration of Carnhallow, Nina’s great project, which I am trying to complete. In my risible way.

  There are letters from fabric companies, upholsterers, interior designers, buyers at auctions, all doing her bidding. Even museums. The torch placed on a shelf, I sift urgently through the papers, as the beam picks out phrases and paragraphs. A pair of silver gilt Georgian plates. I have found some beautiful gesso mirrors. A pier glass and console table. Two white blanc de chine cripples; two silver flower sprigs from Milan; two large glass Japanese Imari jars: £30,000.

  Thirty thousand pounds.

  Deeper in the box is a Moleskine notebook. Nina’s neat, angled handwriting is delicate and singular. The notebook conceals a letter. I unfold it and read. She sounds like she is writing to some expert. The letter is unfinished.

  I’ve got a man from Inverie in Scotland to come down and live in a cottage in Zennor, he dyes his own yarns with vegetable dyes to achieve the right colour for the tapestries.

  Further down:

  The fabric is made and dyed by Richard Humphries; I spoke to the textile dept at the V&A, I’ve chosen moreen, a woollen material with a silken watermark, very right for the period of the bed and its hangings. Dyed to a misty blue green, just ethereal …

  This tells me nothing, except that Nina knew what she was doing. And that she never sent this carefully written letter. I do not know why. But, as with that photograph in the gossip magazine, I have the strange sensation that I am now in possession of a clue.

  Folding the letter, I replace it in the notebook, and slip the notebook in the pocket of my jeans.

  The last box is books, as promised by Juliet. Lots and lots of books. Memoirs, history, novels. Many of the books are in French, too – Colette, Balzac, Simone Weil.

  The thinnest book looks especially cherished: it is a hardback edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. Turning it in my hand, I see it is dog-eared and battered, though Nina has repaired the binding – or had it repaired. Clearly a much-loved volume. Weighed loosely on my palm, the book splits, naturally, on one page. The spine has cracked at this point – this is evidently the poem she liked to read most.

  ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’.

  I don’t know much about Sylvia Plath, or about poetry. Novels were my thing, my means of escape when life became unbearable. But the first line of the poem – circled neatly by Nina – is enough to give me the dusty taste of anxiety, once more.

  This is the light of the mind

  I recall that line very well. It is the epitaph on Nina’s tombstone. And I may not know much about Sylvia Plath but I know one thing. She committed suicide.

  The questions build and burst, like rainstorms over Cape Cornwall. Like Christmas gales.

  Did Nina commit suicide? If she did, that might explain the sense of doom, remorse and secrecy that surrounds her death. That surrounds all of us here, trapped in Carnhallow. But if she did commit suicide, why did she do it? She had everything. Beauty, brains, a son, a husband, a wonderful home. Or so it seemed.

  I consider the child I carry, who will inherit half of Carnhollow, but all of this history.

  Taking the notebooks upstairs, flicking the lights off, I make for the drawing room. But as soon as I open the door a new sickly fear suffuses me, making the notebooks tremble in my hand.

  Chanel. I can smell it. In here. In this room. But this is not a memory of a scent, some trace of something long gone. This is real. This is the perfume of a woman who has just been inside this room, her favourite room, her beautifully restored drawing room: and only this moment departed.

  It’s Nina’s perfume. No one else wears Chanel. She has been in here. She was here a few minutes ago. I know it. I know it. It can’t be. But it is. Nina is quietly and invisibly walking these halls and corridors, like she is waiting for me to leave, at Christmas. So she can take my place.

  30 Days Before Christmas

  Lunchtime

  David is finally coming home tonight. This weekend I will tell him about the pregnancy. But the ideas in my head are driving me to the edge. Literally. I am parked on the pier at St Ives, watching the waves. Helpless.

  Placing a protective hand over my stomach – my womb – I consider the child within. The line from which this child descends. Greedy, evil Jago Kerthen. Violent, drunken Richard Kerthen.

  And David Kerthen: a liar, deceiver, or worse.

  What if I am pregnant by a bad man? A man who has inherited the worst of his ancestors, the worst of the Kerthens? Maybe the idea of this, of my foolish credulity, is what sends me mad: because it is my own fault. I saw what I wanted to see: his charm, his looks, his humour. The beautiful son, the ancient house, the thousand-year dynasty. It was my greedy desire to be part of this that blinded me, and condemned me.

  I revelled in the jealousy of Jessica and my other friends when I first brought David t
o the bars of Shoreditch. Oh yeah. Hey. My new boyfriend. David Kerthen. Lawyer in Marylebone. Family dates back before the Norman Conquest. Owns a fabulous house in Cornwall. Oh, you think he’s handsome? Yes, I suppose he is.

  All of this done with a fake, self-deprecating laugh.

  And now I am pregnant. How will I tell David? How will he react?

  Starting the car, trying to clear my clouded mind, I steer myself through the granite zigzags of the little town, up on to the moorland roads. I am more than happy to get lost in these cold, muddy lanes, these strangely mazy roads through Nancledra, Towednack, Amalebra. Past the meagre churches and holy wells, past the bonsai moorland trees, all shorn to the same angle, writhing in the same ceaseless winds.

  Topping the hill, the north coast comes into a view: the distant tumult of the Atlantic. There are no ships today. But the waves plough on, silently and very fast. As if they have some grim but important job to do, further up the coast, perhaps someone they have to drown off Port Isaac.

  ‘Zennor,’ I say, as I drive into Zennor.

  I am talking to myself. Again.

  Parking the car, I step out. I’ve visited this remote, arty village many times, but still its atmosphere surprises. There is something here, something to do with the little pub, the humble granite cottages, and then the church: old, small, thickly walled, with narrow lancet windows cut deep into the granite like grievous wounds.

  This well-kept church stands in stark contrast with all the ruined Methodist chapels. These chapels remind me, strangely but distinctly, of the ruined tin mines. Because they are all monuments to dead industry. The seams of faith have been worked out, the precious metals of devotion and belief have been exhausted.

  But the stone workings remain. Suffering in the drizzle, crumbling slowly into the cliffsides and the fields, until at last they are overtaken by green nettles and sea thrift, until their broken sills become nests for gulls and choughs.