by Jack Lewis
“But I gave you a month’s notice. You didn’t have to leave straight away.”
“You didn’t want me there,” he said. “And neither did he.”
“Trev? He wouldn’t have minded.”
He shook his head. “Not Trev.”
Jonathan stood as rigid as though someone had threaded a wooden stake down the back of his collar and forced him to keep perfect posture. She guessed that it came from a career in servitude.
“Why didn’t you go home?” she said. “Go stay with your parents or something?”
With this, the stake strapped to his back was removed, and Jonathan slumped down against the wall. He had his knees in front of him, and he wrapped his arms around them.
“Mother and father left the village two years ago. They asked me to go with them, but I said no. Mr Gawthorpe needed me too much. He was alone, and he wasn’t the man he used to be.”
“If he was alone, part of it was his fault,” said Scarlett. “Not Jane and Mum, obviously. But I could have been there. He could have seen his granddaughter.”
“You need to try and forgive him,” said Jonathan. “There are things you don’t understand.”
She shook her head. Over the years, Trev had tried to get her to reach out to her parents. The first time, he almost convinced her. He told her that forgiveness marked the bigger person and that for Ruby’s sake, she should try and speak to them.
She’d almost done it. She even picked up the phone. But she couldn’t. The hurt was too deep; in her time of need, as a scared, sixteen-year-old girl, they’d made her leave. They hadn’t given a damn about what would happen to her.
“He doesn’t warrant my forgiveness. Whatever bad feelings he had in those last few years, were what he deserved.”
Jonathan lifted his head and stared at her. “He changed, you know. Toward the end. I mean, I barely saw him since he spent so much time in his study. He’d sit in there reading until his eyes were so sore that they looked swollen. But he’d talk to me, sometimes.”
“Loneliness can do that to you,” she said. “But as I said, he brought it on himself.”
“He realised the truth near his death,” said Jonathan.
“Too little, too late,” she said. Even if her father had realised that what he’d done to Scarlett was wrong, he hadn’t bothered to tell her.
“You should forgive him.”
This made her angry. “What do you know? Sure, you’ve worked here a long time, but this is family business. You’re an outsider, and you don’t know the story. You don’t know the half of what’s happened to his family.”
She stood up ready to leave. Jonathan didn’t take his eyes off her.
“I’ve always been here,” he said. “At the estate. I used to babysit you and Jane when you were both little. Don’t you remember?”
The realisation hit her. When they’d first got to Gawthorpe, she knew she recognised him. The images came flooding back now.
She remembered her mother and father leaving the estate. Her father in a suit, her mother in a cocktail dress. They got into a car and drove away, leaving her and Jane with the tall, pale-faced boy with blue eyes.
She remembered thinking he was creepy. Then, after one night of babysitting, she’d asked her father to find a different babysitter. Jonathan was dismissed, and Dad brought in a retired woman from the village to watch them.
So, he was right. He’d known the family for a long time, and in Dad’s last few years, he’d lived here with him. Maybe he was more qualified than Scarlett to talk about family history.
She turned to him. “Do you know about Thomas Glanville?” she said.
He nodded. “He’s mentioned in some of your father’s books. He was a conman. He travelled the country marrying women with money. Later, he’d accuse them of witchcraft. Since times weren’t so enlightened back then, it didn’t take much to have a woman drowned or burned on a pyre.”
It didn’t make sense that Thomas was a conman. In the reading with the psychic, Rita had told them that Thomas believed that a witch from his lifetime had been reincarnated into a little girl who lived in Gawthorpe. Had he meant Jane?
She swallowed. A chill spread over her. Or was it Ruby?
“Are you okay?” said Jonathan.
“What about Marga Highgate?” said Scarlet. “Who was she?”
He looked at her strangely for a second, as if to say, ‘how do you know about her?’ But instead of asking a question of his own, he answered hers.
“She was Thomas’ mother. Wherever Thomas travelled, she would follow. When he was trying to seduce a woman in Gawthorpe, one of your ancestors, Marga settled in the village, met a man, and married. After that, she was employed in Gawthorpe as a nanny.”
“So, Thomas Glanville was a conman, and Marga Highgate was his mother?”
He nodded.
“What a team,” said Scarlett.
“Your father discovered all this,” said Jonathan. “And it convinced him of something.”
“What?”
He hung his head. “I just wished he’d reached out to you.”
“What, Jonathan? Spit it out.”
He looked at her, and his eyes seemed wet. “In the last few weeks before he died, your father knew what happened to your sister.”
A stab of ice went through her. The darkness seemed to press in on the windows. She ignored it and focused on Jonathan. She almost couldn’t say the words.
“Tell me,” she said.
Though it lasted only a second, the silence seemed to stretch out. The air was so tense that she could feel it. She couldn’t take it anymore. She felt like she was going to collapse.
Finally, Jonathan shook his head. “I’m sorry, Scarlett. He didn’t tell me.”
Anxiety left her body in a flood, taking all her energy with it. She put her hand to her forehead. Her skin was freeing.
“You wouldn’t even believe some of the things that have happened in the house,” she said.
“I would,” he answered. His voice was low. “Trust me, I would.”
“I just don’t understand. This Thomas Glanville, Rita told us that he’s obsessed with ‘getting the girl.’ If he was a conman, then what the hell is this all about?”
“You had Rita Hildegast in the house?”
She nodded.
“Don’t invite her back,” he said.
“Why ever not?”
He sighed. “Look. Thomas Glanville was a conman at first. Accusing his wives of witchcraft was an easy way to get rid of them. But in his later years, around the time he moved to Gawthorpe, something changed. He started to believe his own lies.”
She couldn’t hold in her disgust. “He got those women killed?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re not talking about enlightened times here. Sure, witch trials started with genuine motivations…”
“Genuine motivations!” said Scarlett, crossing her arms.
He held a hand up. “Come on, I don’t mean it like that. I mean the people who did the trials believed they were ridding the world of evil. After a while, it wasn’t about demons or witches. It was a way of getting rid of people for whatever reason. Your neighbour won’t sell you his field? Accuse his family of being in league with the devil.”
She felt her stomach bubble. It was hard to think that people like that ever existed, much less than picturing them walking the halls of her own house. It made her feel like a taint had spread over the floorboards and walls.
“So how did Glanville believe his own lies?”
Jonathan shrugged. “You know, the rare times that your father used to talk to me, it would often be about you.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” she said.
“He’d tell me that making you leave was a good thing. That it would be the making of you. That you were probably a strong woman with a high-flying career. Only, he’d say it in a weird voice.”
She looked away. “He didn’t even believe his own bullshit.”
&nb
sp; “That’s just the thing, Ms Gawthorpe. He did. So did Glanville, and for the exact same reason. Call it guilt over his actions eating him up and changing the way he thought. The fool started to believe his own accusations.”
With so much to take in, Scarlett found she could hardly speak. She didn’t have to, though. Somewhere beyond the wood store, she heard a car driving toward the estate.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
She found Trev in the lobby. He was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase. His eyes were red, and his shoulders sagged. He clutched the car keys in his hand.
“That’s the last of the petrol,” he said.
“What took you so long?” she said.
He rubbed his forehead. “Rita was acting strange.”
“No kidding.”
“She almost passed out. I had to help her into her house. She looked like she was going to keel over.”
She almost felt sorry for how tired he looked. God knew they could all use some rest. As much as she felt sympathy, there was a stronger feeling inside her. She turned to Ruby.
“Go up to the bedroom for a minute,” she told her. “Not your room. Our bedroom.”
As Ruby walked up the stairs, Scarlett faced Trev.
“You need to come clean,” she said.
“About what?”
“The phone. There’s no use pretending now. I heard it vibrate when we were with Rita.”
He rubbed his hands over his face as if he was trying to clean something off. Gawthorpe had left a stain on them all.
“Come on, Scar. Not tonight.”
“Yes, tonight. Tell me.”
He reached into his pocket, and then pulled out the phone.
“I bought it in the village,” he said.
“So why hide it from me? Who the hell is ‘B’?”
Trev stood up. The tiredness seemed to be gone now. “I did it for us, okay? I needed to find us a way out. I knew how much you hated it here and I just felt so bloody useless.”
She folded her arms. “Go on,” she said.
“B is one of my contacts. You know, from the stuff I used to do. You never wanted to know their names, remember? ‘Spare me the details,’ you used to say.”
She remembered the jobs he used to take. Slipping out of the house to go somewhere in the dead of night. She didn’t know what the jobs were, and she’d never wanted to ask.
“Well, I need to know them now. Who is this person?”
Trev sighed. “His name’s Tony. He and a few others stole a truck full of TVs. They just need a hand unloading them. It’s cash in hand.”
“It’s handling stolen goods, Trev. You could go down for that.”
His face was starting to turn red. “I’m doing what I can, okay? I don’t have any experience, I don’t have qualifications. I’m nothing. But I won’t see us go short.”
“I thought you’d left all that behind?” she said.
He let out a long sigh. “So did I. What else was I supposed to do? We need to get away from this place, and we needed money.”
“So why lie about it?”
He hung his head. “I don’t know.”
She couldn’t deal with this right now. She knew that he’d lied for the right reasons, but a lie was still a lie, and right now, she couldn’t even look at him.
She walked past him and went up the stairs. The treads groaned under her footsteps. She heard Trev move behind her. He said something, but she tuned him out.
She just wanted to go to the bedroom with Ruby, and shut the door. Block out the rest of the house. Ignore the rest of the world. Most importantly, shut out Trev.
When she reached the top of the staircase, she stopped. Something felt strange. The west wing was to her left, the east wing to her right. She had a peculiar feeling as if every inch of her skin was tingling. Warning her of something.
She looked at the west wing. A light glowed down the hall, where she knew Ruby was in their bedroom. Somehow, she knew that whatever was causing the feeling wasn’t there. Then she looked to her right.
There. Down the east wing, along the darkened hallway and at the very end, a door was open.
The metal door. For the first time in years, since she’d seen her father let a terrified Peter Jones out of the room, the metal door was unlocked.
As much as she’d always hated to even look at it, she couldn’t ignore it now. The door was open for a reason. It was an invitation to her, a hand beckoning her on through the darkness. Telling her that unless she went in, she’d never know the truth. She’d never be free of the past.
Gulping, she started to walk onto the east wing. Everything was silent save her own shaky breaths. The opened door called her on, a mouth in the darkness telling her she had to walk into it.
Just before she went to the doorway, she stepped into her old bedroom, on the left. There were piles of her dad’s books propped against the wall. She took one and held it in her hands. ‘Witchcraft Throughout the Ages’, the title read.
She stepped back into the hallway and walked over to the metal door. Her heart thumped in her chest. She felt lightheaded, as if she might just faint at any moment.
Finally, she stood outside the door. It felt wrong to be here. She remembered her sister creeping up to it and putting her ear against the keyhole, then listening to something only she could hear. Had someone spoken to her through the door?
She shook the thought away. She gripped the book, kneeled and then jammed it under the door, holding it in place. If she was going into the room, there was no way she was letting the door close behind her.
Trev called out from somewhere in the house, but she ignored him.
Come on, she told herself. You have to do this.
Her brain told her it was just a door, just a room, just a house. At the same time, she knew it wasn’t. Something warned her away from it, a cold place deep inside that knew more than her logical brain could ever fathom. A part of her that knew the secrets of the house. The part of her that was still a little girl and was terrified of the places she knew she shouldn’t go.
She couldn’t let it scare her. She was better than that now. With her pulse hammering, she stepped into the room.
At first, it seemed just like any other room in the house. Wooden walls that were beginning to rot, perhaps with the onset of woodworm. It was barely larger than her bedroom.
Unlike the others, this one had no windows. It was a place designed to trap the darkness and hold it in, and the black was so thick that it felt like she had to put her hands out to push through it.
Gradually, her eyes began to adjust. There was a table to her right, and a small record player was set on top of it. The dust cover was up, and she could see a black record sat in the centre, ready to play.
On her left, close enough to the corner of the wall that it was covered by shadow, there was a painting. It showed a woman sat on a plush, velvet-lined chair. Her face and cheekbones were strangely familiar, and Scarlett realised that it must have been one of her long-dead ancestors.
Her hair was blonde like Jane and Ruby’s. Around her neck, was a necklace. A necklace that Scarlett knew all too well.
As she studied it more, she gulped. But it wasn’t the necklace that worried her. It was the expression on the woman’s face. It was as though she was trying to keep her emotions in check and sit still for the painting, but a faint look on her face betrayed her. It was fear.
No, not just fear. Terror. A deep well behind her eyes that reflected some untold horror. Was it the painter? Did he scare her? Or was it something else?
On the bottom of the frame, someone had fixed a small wooden block, and they’d written on it with black ink.
‘Cecilia Gawthorpe by T. Glanville’
She knew who this was now. This was certainly one of her ancestors. She read the names again, and she felt sick. Thomas Glanville had assaulted one of her ancestors, and he had made sure she was burned as a witch. Was this the tragic pair? Was Cecilia Gawthorpe posing for
a portrait by the man who would ultimately kill her?
That explained the look of terror. The painting must have been made before anything happened, but even then, Cecilia knew something was wrong with her suitor. Her eyes said it all.
Scarlett couldn’t bear to look at it any longer. She turned away and focussed on the rest of the room. The floor was covered by a carpet. It had patterns on it, though she couldn’t make them out. In the corner, part of the carpet had curled up, almost as if someone had wrenched it free to reveal the ancient timber floorboards.