He did not reply.
Wondering what he had to be sniffy about, she rolled over and closed her eyes.
Downstairs in the kitchen, stretched out on an assortment of cushions purloined from the sunroom, Almanac was having trouble sleeping. Several times he considered talking to Ugo or Olive or playing the phonogram, which worked just fine now the library was unlocked, to occupy his restless mind, but any of those things could defeat his purpose. If Lord Nigel, say, left the study to take food from the pantry, or someone else came in to tidy up the dirty pots he had forced himself to leave on the range, Almanac wanted to know about it. All it would take would be for him to properly see one occupant of the house besides Etta, and the ‘ghost’ theory would be disproven, perhaps the avenging-sorcerer theory along with it.
Doctor Mithily had suggested employing the Scientific Method, and that was exactly what he was doing. Testing, measuring, and evaluating was its own kind of work.
Still, his thoughts were troubled. Etta was upset with him, he knew, although exactly why he couldn’t tell. He was working as hard as she was to break the spell – harder, if physical labour counted for more than flicking through old books – and he was without doubt pulling his weight when it came to chores. If only she would tell him what was wrong, he could see about setting it to rights!
In the orphanage, every time he and Josh had argued, the mistress had stepped in to sternly mete out punishments to both sides. As a result, he was quite inexperienced in fixing such things himself.
Perhaps, he decided, if he was extra nice for the next few days, the problem would go away on its own. Or if he solved the riddle of the list and proved to her that he was contributing?
It was while pondering the list, each element of which he perfectly recalled, that one of the bell-pulls rang.
He sat upright on his cushions, peering at the row of bells in the gloom of the kitchen.
Soot dusted down from the chimney.
‘Don’t say it,’ Almanac hissed, climbing to his feet. ‘I suppose that’s Madame Iris. If she’s mad like you say, what harm is there in talking to her?’
More importantly, he thought, if the spell prevented Ugo from telling them anything about itself, maybe Iris’s dangerous nonsense would turn out to be very useful indeed.
Ugo stayed silent. The bell that was vibrating belonged to the print room, which was in the North Wing. Almanac believed he knew the way. Without the aid of a candle, he set off through the darkened corridors and rooms, hurrying lest he miss the summons again.
The print room was a friendly room by day, but considerably less so by night, particularly when he found it to be empty of anything but shadows. Almanac sniffed, and again caught the fading hint of perfume. Madame Iris had been here!
Distantly, a bell rang – but the bell-pull in the print room did not move. Hurrying back to the kitchen, he asked Ugo, ‘Which one was it? Tell me!’
The sweep, however, didn’t reply.
As Almanac marshalled his best arguments to convince Ugo to help him, another rang, this time from the sunroom. Almanac tore off like a dog set loose from its leash, skidding around corners in his haste to catch Madame Iris before she fled again.
He burst through the door, scanning the familiar scene for any sign of the manor’s most elusive inhabitant. Not there!
‘Madame Iris!’ he called. ‘What do you want?’
That provoked a reply, but not the one he’d expected.
‘What is this infernal racket?’ Lord Nigel’s voice carried clearly from his study, just along the hall. ‘I took my leave of the Royal Court for solitude, not bedlam. Cease or you will disturb the Lady as well as me!’
‘Sorry!’ Almanac hissed back, but now a third bell was ringing, and a fourth.
Back in the kitchen, he stared in helpless puzzlement as all the bells tinkled one after the other, sometimes several at a time. It wasn’t possible that Madame Iris could be ringing them all at once … Was it?
An alternative was that the pealing bells were nothing but a diversion, allowing someone to get to the food stores unseen.
‘I told you she was mad,’ whispered Ugo, unhelpfully. Olive instructed him to be quiet. Lord Nigel was yelling again, and Almanac wished that someone would tell him what to do.
The bell in the Yellow Room rang. Remembering Lord Nigel’s concern for Lady Simone, Almanac decided that the least he could do was be the very best servant he could. Ghost or no ghost, she didn’t deserve to be upset unduly.
Dragging a chair over to the bells, he inspected the mechanisms and worked out a way to silence them. First, he wrapped a tablecloth around the wires that connected them to the bell-pulls through the walls. Then he pulled the tablecloth tight, so that the wires couldn’t move. With one last muffled peal, the bells fell silent.
Hoping the solution would hold, he hurried up the stairs to where Lady Simone lay. A yellow candleflame flickered beside her bed. Lord Nigel’s complaints were already subsiding into a low grumble.
‘I’m sorry if you were disturbed, Lady Simone,’ Almanac said. ‘I’ve put everything back to rights now, I think.’
‘You have no reason to apologise to me, dear boy,’ she said in a feeble voice from beneath her coverlet. ‘You are doing what you think best. That is all we can ask of you.’
He hesitated. ‘I could do better,’ he said, amazed at his boldness, ‘if I knew what I was supposed to be doing.’
‘I believe you have hit on life’s great conundrum,’ she said, surprising him with a light chuckle. ‘The quest for this knowledge has driven seers into the deserts for centuries – because, of course, every person on this quest finds a different revelation. Especially here, in this house divided. Not everyone agrees with my dear friend Iris.’
Almanac thought he caught a whiff of the madame’s perfume and spun about, but saw no one.
‘Do you know what she wants to tell me?’ he asked.
‘Yes, but I cannot speak for her. I wish I could … ’
‘Can you tell me why you can’t?’
Lady Simone shifted, but did not reply.
Almanac sighed. ‘I have so many questions.’
‘I know you do, my boy, but you must leave me now. This conversation taxes me too much. I am not as strong as I used to be … but please, ignore Nigel. He worries overmuch. I ail no more than anyone here.’
Almanac took his leave of Lady Simone and went up the stairs to visit Doctor Mithily. She was awake, tapping at the keys of an unseen machine behind her screen. The tick-tacking sound wasn’t loud enough to hide his footfalls.
‘You are making excellent progress,’ she said. ‘Don’t let me stop you.’
‘Progress at what?’
‘You will learn soon enough.’
‘How?’
‘Use your mind, child, as well as your muscles. Find new facts if the few you possess add up to nonsense. When the universe is reluctant to give you more facts, deduce. If your deductions fail, persist. Should you grow weary, remember that many before you have failed – and that failure invariably precedes success. I speak from experience.’
‘What about Madame Iris?’ he asked. ‘Should I ignore her, like Ugo says? Is she really mad?’
‘I have told you everything I can, dear child. Please, leave me to my experiments.’
Dispirited and confused, Almanac descended to the servants’ quarters and tiptoed past Etta’s room. Her door was ajar. She slept soundly, despite the recent ruckus, and didn’t hear him retreat downstairs to the kitchen to see if he had caught a ‘ghost’ in the act.
On the kitchen table was a note in the head butler’s firm hand.
Almanac –
The duties of a second footman do not extend to creating ruckuses in the midnight hour.
Need I express my hope that these circumstances will never recur?
Much obliged,
Mr Packer, Head Butler
The pantry was untouched, and in the morning when Almanac awoke on the cushion
s in the kitchen, feeling severely chastened, it was the same. The dishes, however, were clean.
Etta wasn’t surprised to find Almanac awake before her. What stunned her was that he had breakfast already on the stove and tea brewing in the pot. The bacon might have been burning, and ‘boiled to the consistency of rubber’ was a kind way to describe his eggs, but he was making an effort, which somehow only made her angrier at him. Obviously, he knew he had done something wrong, but being nice now wasn’t the same as apologising for what he had done then.
‘Did you … have a good night?’ he asked her, and there was something in his voice that sounded like an accusation. Why was she angry at him for doing a good deed? She was cooking most of the time and compiling the list and sitting out watching the gate until all hours, and if he had dark rings under his eyes too, then that wasn’t her fault.
‘Fine, I suppose,’ she said, taking the bacon off the griddle before it could blacken any further, declaring herself tired of eggs, and accepting a cup of tea with as much grace as she could muster. ‘You?’
‘I … well … there was … It doesn’t matter.’
One complete sentence was all she seemed likely to get out of him. The boy couldn’t even talk properly! With a grunt of grudging acknowledgement, she took her tea to the library.
There, she applied herself to the books with renewed vigour. Get this task out of the way, she told herself, and she could return to the problem of the gate. Rather than wait for it to be opened, maybe there was something else in Silas’s shed that could help her climb over it. Hammer and nails to repair the ladder, perhaps, or could she make a new one out of fallen branches? She didn’t know, but her sleeping mind had been active again, and she had woken determined to try.
Book after book flew through her hands, while Ugo remained silent, perhaps sensing her inner turmoil. The coward, she thought, not really blaming him. She wrote down several new words without absorbing them, so fixated was she on her feud with Almanac, as she now thought of it. Arguments with her sisters came and went as easily as breath; feuds persisted. Her mother used to say that they were like colds, in that they were contagious and quickly spread, unless promptly treated. Here, there was no Ma and therefore no antidote. Etta could only turn her anger and resentment at Almanac’s haplessness over and over until it boiled inside her of its own accord.
‘He thinks he’s the boss here, just because he arrived first,’ she muttered. ‘By a matter of minutes! If our positions were reversed … ’
Putting the very final book back on the shelf brought her little sense of accomplishment.
As she sat back to cast her gaze over the completed list, in the unlikely event that some kind of sense would leap out at her from the apparently random words, something fluttered in the sunroom.
Looking up, thinking perhaps a bird had got in through an open window, she saw nothing but light casting diagonal lines through suspended particles of dust.
The fluttering came again.
Now sorely puzzled, Etta stood and walked out of the library to see who or what was out there.
The sunroom was empty.
The bell-pull, however, was swaying as though recently yanked.
‘H-hello?’ she said, unable to keep a fearful quiver from her voice. Someone – Almanac, perhaps – might have tiptoed in and pulled it, then run out again before she could see, but she hadn’t heard any bell ringing, or floor creaking. But there, just at the edge of her nostrils, was the hint of Madame Iris’s perfume …
The ghost of Madame Iris, she couldn’t help but think.
A shiver went down her spine – because there was a huge difference between contemplating a ghost in theory and seeing one in action – and she spun around feeling as though someone was breathing on the nape of her neck.
When she turned back, the bell-pull was dancing again.
Etta forced herself not to run. If it was a trick, it was a very good one, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a trick. It was only a bell-pull, and it was only moving. She hadn’t actually seen a spectral hand giving it a tug. Someone could be in the ceiling, yanking it from above to create the illusion of a phantasmal presence …
She leaned closer and looked up to where the ribbon vanished into the plaster. Nothing suspicious was visible, but when the bell-pull brushed her hair, she felt a strange sensation, as of a fly’s wings tickling her cheek.
Etta jumped away, realising with a start that the bell-pull wasn’t just swaying. It was buzzing.
Hesitantly, she reached out to touch the fabric. Her fingertips registered the same sensation. It was like stroking a tuning fork, only the vibration didn’t go away. If anything, it got stronger.
At the very edge of her hearing, she detected a faint sound.
‘ … eeeeee… ’
It sounded uncannily like a woman’s voice.
‘I wish you would not,’ said Ugo from the marble fireplace, making her cry out in surprise, because she had been listening so hard and he sounded so close. She hadn’t even known he was there.
‘Don’t do that!’ she snapped at him. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’
‘Forgive me. I am only trying to help.’
‘Telling me what’s going on would help. Leaving me alone so I can hear this thing would help.’
He fell silent, and she leaned in again to listen to the bell-pull. She was reminded of a time when she and her next-oldest sister, Sadie (Sadness), had attached string to two paper tumblers and talked to each other in whispers across the yard in order to coordinate the theft of a freshly baked tart.
The voice was still there, breathy and thin, little more than a stretched-out vowel.
‘ … aaayy… ’
‘Can you speak up a bit?’ she asked, amazed at her bravery. ‘I can’t quite hear you.’
The vibration intensified.
‘Beeeee…’
‘Bee? What bee? I don’t understand.’
‘… brrrrraaaaavvvvve.’
‘Be brave?’ Etta leaned closer. ‘How?’
‘Beeeee brrrrraaaaavvvvve. Lleeeaavvvvve.’
The chill in her spine turned to gooseflesh. Leave.
‘But how? And why? What will happen if I don’t?’
But the voice coming from the bell-pull had sighed into silence.
Etta rocked back against the arm of a sofa for support. Had she heard correctly? If she had, well, leave didn’t leave much room for doubt as to what Madame Iris wanted her to do. But how?
‘So that’s what she’s been trying to tell us,’ Etta said. ‘Why didn’t you want us to talk to her, Ugo? Do you want the spell to work its magic on us?’
Something shifted inside the chimney.
‘Talk to Almanac,’ Ugo said. ‘He has made a discovery. He has not called you yet, but he will.’
She had found something too, but would Almanac admit the importance of it? She didn’t think so. He would think his discovery better than hers. ‘Why should I believe you?’
‘I will not lie.’
‘What if that’s a lie?’
‘Trust me, Rhetta,’ he said. ‘Or is your name Rosetta? I’m not your enemy.’
‘But … how do you know Etta’s not my real name?’ She backed away, trying to remember if she had told anyone it was a nickname since coming to the manor. She hadn’t, she was sure of it, not even Almanac! Her letter from Lady Simone, with the return address of Sir Palemoon’s Ruin, was the only time her real name had been used by anyone, and that note was safely hidden away with her old clothes.
If she had never been invited to the manor, she would never have come, and she wouldn’t be in the position she was in now.
‘I don’t trust you,’ she said, turning her back on the fireplace and running from the room. ‘I don’t trust any of you!’
Almanac’s morning had been a disaster from the beginning. The cushions he had slept on in the kitchen had given him a crick in his back, for starters, and what little sleep he’d had had been restless
and unsatisfying. He needed to tell Etta about everything that had happened during the night, but he correctly suspected that she would wake in no better frame of mind than she had been the night before. Making her breakfast had seemed a perfectly fine solution, until he saw her face and knew it wasn’t going to work. She had definitely taken a set against him, for reasons he failed to fathom, and that only made him angry in turn. What was the point of punishing him if he didn’t know what he had done wrong?
And didn’t they have more important things to worry about than their disagreements?
He had lost his appetite by the time she left, not giving him a chance to tell her all he had planned to. Throwing everything he had cooked in the bin and leaving the dishes in the sink – he hated leaving them for the magic of the spell to clean up – he went downstairs and took his wounded irritation out on the rubbish.
Four wheelbarrow loads he carted up the stairs before emerging from the spiral of his thoughts long enough to realise that Olive was trying to talk to him. Normally, he was glad of her company and the distraction it offered from his unpleasant task. This time, though, he could only apologise and beg that he be left to stew in peace. Josh would have understood, knowing that withdrawing was how Almanac dealt with intractable conflict. He would think of a way to heal the rift, if Etta didn’t before him. Or maybe they just needed time apart. Soon enough, he hoped, they would go back to being friends who held hands and went for walks together.
That was when he discovered the chamber-pot.
It was buried in the rubbish as the lampshade had been. He levered it free of the refuse, finding that it was intact apart from a chip he had accidentally taken from its lip with the spade, but missing its lid. It was a handsome antique, and, had it been complete, might have been considered of value in the outside world.
Her Perilous Mansion Page 9