Page 9 of Happily Ever After
But that didn’t matter. We got on. The possibility of our falling deeply in love and doing lots of staring into the depths of one another’s eyes to see our souls reflected still existed. I wouldn’t object to Templewood being sold either, I thought, looking at the fractured ceiling and the row upon row of unused crockery. Hell, I’d hold the flamethrower myself, if it came to it.
I thought, mistily, of all those books where the heroine had set sail for foreign parts and imagined myself on the deck of a yacht, clamping a large-brimmed hat tightly to my head whilst my skirts blew in the breeze of transit. I couldn’t somehow imagine Hugo traipsing up a mountain wearing a sweaty rucksack in search of a view; he had far more of the organised helicopter tour about him. And with that thought satisfyingly in place, I tipped my toast crumbs into the sink, rinsed off my plate, and went off to the library and more data entry.
5
BLY – THE TURN OF THE SCREW, HENRY JAMES
Two weeks passed. Or rather, they inched slowly along, eased only by the fibre of occasional meetings with Hugo, usually in the kitchen. I learned my way around the house, mostly by trial and error which meant a lot of openings of doors, surprising Lady Tanith or The Master, apologising and closing the door again. Mrs Compton stomped her way to and from the kitchen doing I knew not what, and serving us meals every evening that seemed to have come straight from the School Dinner Cookbook. Lady Tanith would sometimes loom over me as I tapped yet another ‘Author, Title, Date’ into the spreadsheet on the computer and enquire whether I’d made any progress in looking for Oswald’s diaries. As I considered that finding them would be my end goal, I didn’t see how I could ‘make progress’ in the task – perhaps they were spread throughout the library as separate sheets? – I supposed that she was really checking up on me to make sure I hadn’t legged it down the drive and headed for civilisation as fast as I could go.
As the only places I had to gotowere a rusting static bus in a field or my sister’s complacency, I had decided, on balance, to stay put.
Templewood seemed to be built on mystery and I slotted in as well as any heroine could be expected to, under the circumstances.
The whole place was sinister. Locked rooms and who only knew what was going on inside them? Noises so soft as to be almost inaudible but with no visible cause. Footsteps in the dark. I half expected to come down one morning to find a body in the library, which would actually be a relief. There was a breath-holding quality to Templewood as though a crime were about to be perpetrated but was awaiting the right time.
I came across other workers every now and then – a sad-eyed joiner patiently nailing something to a gate, a man shouting at bullocks in the fields beyond the garden. After a quick glance that seemed to have something ofThe Gulag Archipelagoabout it, they dismissed me as clearly unworthy of notice. Hugo’s brother did not appear. He was occasionally referenced by Lady Tanith in a casual, throwaway way, to which Hugo reacted like a sullen teenager. I gathered that there was no love lost between the brothers although I didn’t know why. Surely becoming the heir to the estate wasn’t something to resent? Jasper’s renouncing the title meant that Hugo would never have to find a job or move away – his life was here, amid these glorious gardens and this house full of potential. So why did Hugo grunt and look down at his plate whenever Lady Tanith asked if he wanted to come with her to visit Jasper? Did Jasper evenexist, hinted my brain, trying to veer me into dark thoughts of bodies behind doors again. Was he real or Hugo’s alter-ego, hived off to become a separate identity because of some hideous crime committed in childhood?
I didn’t ask. Icouldn’task. I was too afraid of the answers.
And so, here I was, on what was probably a Tuesday but it didn’t really matter as every day at Templewood was the same as the one before, although I had nominally negotiated for Sundays off. I finished inputting the books from the pile I’d scraped from a shelf, shared a dinner of frozen-in-the-middle cottage pie with Hugo, Lady Tanith being nowhere to be seen, and headed for bed, my steps dogged, or rather catted, by The Master. Every night he tried to get into my room and every night I managed, by some careful bodily arrangement, to prevent him. He continued to try, like an unsuccessful Tinder date, to force his way past me, but his beefy attributes always jammed him between my leg and the door edge in a wobbly mass of fur and embarrassment.
Tonight, I’d fallen asleep to the sound of discontented fur-cleaning from outside the door, and withGreat Expectationslying crumple-paged across my chest. When the half million cups of tea that I’d drunk – I filled a vacuum flask every morning; there was no chance that anyone in this house was going to bring me continual top-ups during the day – percolated down to my bladder earlier than usual, I found myself awake with a book spine uncomfortably pressed into my ribcage.
It was still dark. Usually I woke after dawn, to the sound of birds in the attic above my head. At least, I was going to choose to believe it was birds that scuffled and clattered about. Some of the sounds were distressingly close to footsteps, coming and going with the sort of shuffling creak that made me imagine Dread Things. However, I’d seen starlings swoop above the window, so if therewasa ghost up there I could carry on in ignorance of its existence.
But now, everything was silent and still. I slept with my window and curtains open, mostly to let out the smell of general neglect and Mrs Compton’s attempts to make the place seem cleaned by spraying furniture polish into the air. I’d come upon her doing it once or twice, whilst I’d been finding my way around the house. She’d open a door, stand just inside the room, spray Mr Sheen randomly and then close the door quickly to trap the scent. When she’d turned around to see me watching I got a look so vitriolic that it almost ignited the aerosol fumes.
I had half wondered if she was trying to cover up the smell of death and kept a wary eye open for unnatural numbers of flies swarming outside a door. Despite frequent mentions, Jasper had still not made an appearance at Templewood and I had now started imagining him lying bloodstained and lifeless in one of the many rooms that nobody appeared ever to enter.
Templewood had got into my soul, and not in a good way.
I went and stood at the window. Outside there was nothing but blackness, punctuated by darker blackness where trees and shrubs deepened the night. Above, the stars shone, white-hot diamonds in the cold sky, filling the air with a grey almost-light. I took a deep breath, enjoying the feeling of freshness. The air smelled of water, a vague perfume from some of the flowers, and newly-mown grass and it almost made me want to climb out of the window and run barefoot far and fast away from this place.
Instead I sighed and opened my bedroom door to head to the bathroom. I turned the knob quietly, partly because I didn’t want to wake anyone, even if they were sleeping four acres away, and partly because I didn’t want the cat to know I was up. I wouldn’t have put it past the feline interloper to slide into my room and be in my bed with a come-hither expression and a spritz of mackerel cologne when I got back.
As I stepped out onto the landing, the ghost was there. Frozen static with her back to me, her blonde hair piled high on her head and her ball gown swirling around her legs, she was standing by the window where I’d seen her on my first arrival. My brain took in her image in one solid gulp of terror. Tall and willowy, blonde and slender, wearing a pink satin dress that fell from a draped bodice to just above the floor, with a pair of kitten heels peeking out from underneath, she continued to stand, gazing out into the night. Or possibly seeing daylight in another time; waiting her turn to step out onto the balcony and die again.
My mouth instantly dried, open in a half shriek that I killed as the ghost began to turn towards me. I shot back into my room, my bladder no longer of any concern, terrified beyond understanding at the thought that she might see me, looking out of eyes ruined by her last fall. I closed the door, then locked it, which took some considerable effort, as the huge metal key didn’t seem to have been turned since the queen before last.
I fled to my bed and dragged myself deep under the covers, but that was worse, because then I couldn’t see whether the ghost had followed me in – as it slowly dawned on me that a locked door probably wasn’t much of a deterrent to the Other Side – so I inched one eye and half my nose out until I was hunched on the mattress with the duvet and coverlet draped around me and gathered under my chin.
There was no sign of ghostly following. Nor was there any sound at all. I half expected a ghastly scream, a re-enactment of the accident that had caused her to hang around in these draughty corridors, maybe a slam of the balcony doors. But there was nothing. Not even a sigh of wind rattling the window in its sash. It was as though the entire night was holding its breath along with me, so as not to antagonise the supernatural.
As I continued not to be visited by a spectre, the terror began to lift, assisted by the first tweeting and muttering from the birds in the garden beyond, and a gradual thinning of the darkness into early dawn. The dim light gave me courage, which, added to my insatiable curiosity and bulging bladder, drove me out from beneath my swaddling and sent me trepidatiously to my door. I pressed my ear to the wood, after a momentary recoil in case a ghostly arm was about to stretch through the panels and grab me, but couldn’t hear anything. Did ghosts even make a noise? Unless reliving the trauma of their death, weren’t theymeantto be silent, anyway?
I opened the door slowly and peered around its leading edge. The landing, balcony, and double windows were empty. There was absolutely nothing, no bloody handprints on the walls, no mysteriously tattered garments, no skeletal forms clattering along the boards. Nothing.
Gaining a little more courage at the lack of uncanny occurrences, I walked along to where I’d seen the figure. Was that a trace of perfume I could smell? Or was my imagination racing ahead of me and attributing a female scent to the ever-lingering furniture polish smell? I didn’t know, and only the gradual greying at the window revealing that the morning was cantering in with full birdsong and a rising sun, made me brave enough to walk along to the head of the stairs, where there was still no sign of anything at all.
I trailed a hand along the wall as I walked back down the deep carpet, visited the bathroom in a world-record breaking time, and then went back to my room. This plaster, this paper, it must have seen so much drama over the years it had, evidently, been here. Perhaps it occasionally replayed scenes from that drama, like a DVD stuck on a favourite clip. I shuddered. This house was hundreds of years old, it must have entertained such a lot of anger, fear and pain. Now was absolutelynotthe time that I needed to find out that I was psychic or had any kind of affiliation for Things Unseen.
Some of the scarier passages from my recent reading lurched up from my subconscious to make me aware that there could be horrors lurking in any of the unsightly cupboards or behind any of these doors. It almost made me glad to hurtle back into my room and leap into bed, although unless the duvet was soaked in holy water and embroidered with religious symbols it probably wouldn’t be much of a deterrent to some of the things I’d read about. I clutched my knees up under my chin and wrapped my arms around them, making myself as small a target for the Otherworld as I could, thankful that the sheets were still warm to my chilled body and I could dig my feet in to whatever the mattress was made of for extra heat.
Templewood reallywasa haunted house. Great. That would just put the proverbial cherry on top of the metaphorical icing. Searching for lost diaries for a woman who didn’t seem to realise that slavery was illegal and her diffident-to-the-point-of-invisibility son, in a room where the books didn’t so much need recovering as a full-on archaeological expedition, in a house that might suddenly reveal terrors beyond my wildest imaginings wasnotin the life plan.
And I was stuck here by my lack of anywhere else to go and the need to earn money.
I gathered more of the duvet around me and squared my shoulders.Plentyof women, my life gleaned from reading had told me, had to earn a living. Many of them found themselves in less-than-savoury positions, driven there by impecuniousness and lack of family ‘background’. I was hardly a governess to an unruly child, with a master of the house who kept vanishing for weeks at a time. I was getting paid, board and lodging – even if the board was still half frozen and served with intense disinterest by Mrs Compton and the lodging was haunted. I tried to square my shoulders again but this was as good as it got, huddled under a bedcover, waiting for full daylight so that I could get up and start work again.
