REBECCA JAMES was born in 1983. She worked in publishing for several years before leaving to write full-time, and is now the author of eight previous novels written under a pseudonym. Her favourite things are autumn walks, Argentinean red wine and curling up in the winter with a good old-fashioned ghost story. She lives in Bristol with her husband and two daughters.
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Rebecca James 2018
Rebecca James asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9781474073172
For the little soul
who wrote this book with me.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper, ‘I am she!’
MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
Prologue
Cornwall, winter 1806
Listen! Can you hear it?
There, right there. Listen. You are not listening. Listen hard.
Listen harder.
I hear them before I see them. Their shouts come from across the hill, calling my name, calling me Witch. They come with their spikes and flames, their red mouths and their black intent. They say I am the one to fear, but the fear is with them. Fear is in them. It has no need of me. Their fear will catch them at the final hour.
Shadows crawl over the moors, spreading dark against dark. Their torches dance, lit from the fire at the barn. Burn her! Drown her! Smoke her from her hole!
Witch.
It is not safe for me here. They will touch their fires to my home and I will perish inside. So I escape into the night, their steps bleeding close on the wind like a dread gallop. Down the cliffs, low to the ground, the sky watches, patient and indifferent. Stars are frozen. Moon observes. I cannot turn back: my home is lost.
At the end I will put myself there again, sitting by my hearth and staring at the painting on the wall. It is the painting I did for him but never gave him, a likeness of my house for he had admired it so; he had said what a perfect spot it held, high on the cliffs, a sweet little cottage circled by hay and firs. Oh, for those first days of innocence! For those days of blind hope, before he turned me away. On the night I planned to bestow the painting on him, he broke my heart. The gift I had meant for him remained with me, just as did every other part I imagined I would share.
I never thought I would be a woman for love, or a woman to be loved.
A woman should always trust herself.
What will remain at my home, after I am gone? What will he keep and what will he burn? I fear for my looking glass, my beloved mirror. I pray that it survives, for I wonder if a piece of me, however small, might survive with it.
Ivan. My love. How could you?
I shall never know. I will never understand. What is the point, now, in any case? Ivan de Grey betrayed me. I believed that he worshipped me, I swallowed his deceits and oh, it hurts, it hurts, to think of his arms around me…
Now they have built their case against me. They have shaped their fight and honed their resolve. There is nothing I can say or do; to protest confirms my fate.
I spill down the cliff path. I know it well enough in the dark. Brambles tear my skin and eyes; blood tastes sour in my mouth. I stumble, holding mud and air. My head hits a rock, sharp, hard, and I fall until a pain pulls me back, my hair caught on a stalk. For a moment, I lie still. Thunder, thunder, thunder. I gaze up at the night, the cool white pearl of the moon. I wish I were an animal. I wish I were a wolf. I wish I would transform, and be waiting for them when they come over the edge. I would leap at them with my jaws thrown wide.
But I am a woman. Not a wolf. Perhaps I am something in between.
Run.
I meet the sea, which has swallowed the sand completely. It foams around my ankles and I wade through it, salt burning the cuts on my legs. Ivan long ago decided I was marked. He saw the red on my body and the rest was easy. He told his friends and those friends told their enemies, and all are united in the crusade. Witch.
All he had to do was to make her believe in his love.
Love.
Rotten, stinking, hated love. Love is for fools, bound for hell.
I detest its creeping treacheries. I resent the shell it made of me. My weakness to be wanted, my pathetic, throbbing heart…
There is comfort in knowing that while I die, my hatred lives on. My hatred remains here, on this coast, in this sea and under this sky. My hatred remains.
I trust it with my vengeance, for vengeance I will take.
The water pulls me to my knees, black and thrashing and soaking my dress.
I turn to shore. High on the hill is a bright, living blaze. The men stride towards me, stride through the sea. I will not go with them. I will go on my own, willingly. I will swim to the deep and deeper still. I will picture my home as I drown.
I crawl into the wild dark.
A hand grabs my ankle and pulls me down.
Chapter 1
London, 1947
‘Alice Miller – for heaven’s sake, wake up.’
It might be Mrs Wilson’s uppity remark that jolts me out of my eleven o’clock reverie, or else it’s the warm muzzle
of the Quakers Oatley & Sons’ resident Red Setter as it nudges hotly against my lap, for it’s hard to know which happens first.
‘I’m awake,’ I tell her, finding the dog’s warm ears under my desk and working them through my fingers; Jasper breathes contentedly through his nose and his tail bangs on the floor. ‘Can’t you see my eyes are open?’
Mrs Wilson, the firm’s stuffy administrator, draws deeply on her cigarette, sucking in her cheeks. She dispels a plume of smoke before grinding the cigarette out in an ashtray. She pushes her glasses on to the bridge of her nose.
‘I wouldn’t suggest for a moment, Miss Miller, that your eyes being open has the slightest thing to do with it.’ Her fingers clack-clack on the typewriter. ‘It doesn’t take a fool to see that you’re miles away. As usual.’
If I were able to dispute the accusation, I would. But she’s right. There is little about being a solicitor’s secretary that I find stimulating, and my memories too often call me back. This is not living, as I have known living. Haven’t we all known living – and dying – in ways impossible to articulate? But to look in Jean Wilson’s eyes, just two years after wartime, as flat and grey as the city streets seem to me now, it’s as if that world might never have existed; as if it had been just one of my daydreams. I wonder what Mrs Wilson lost during those years. It is easy for one to feel as though one’s own loss overtakes all others’ – but then one remembers: mine is a lone story, a single note in a piece of music that, if played back many years from now, would be obscured by the orchestra that surrounds it.
Jasper pads out from under the desk and settles on a rug by the window. Through it, I hear the noisy brakes of a bus and a car tooting its horn.
The telephone rings. ‘Good morning, Quakers Oatley?’
We are expecting a call from an irksome client but to my surprise it is not he. For a moment, I hear the crackle of the line and the faint echo of another exchange, before a smart voice introduces itself. My grip tightens. I’m quiet for long enough that Mrs Wilson’s interest is aroused. She glances at me over the top of her spectacles.
‘Of course,’ I say, once I’ve taken in all that he’s said. ‘I’ll be with you right away.’
I replace the telephone, retrieve my coat and open the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Goodbye, Mrs Wilson.’ I put on my coat. ‘Goodbye, Jasper.’
It is the last time I will see either of them.
*
The Tube still smells as it did in the war – fusty, sour, hot with bodies. Next to me on the platform is a woman with her children; she smacks one of them on the hand and tells him off, then pulls both to her when the train comes in. I imagine her down here during the Blitz, when they were babies, holding them close while the sky fell down.
I take the train to Marble Arch, repeating the address as I go. The building is closer than I think and I’m here early, so I step into a café next door and order a mug of tea. I drink it slowly, still wearing my hat. A man at the table next to me slices his fried egg on toast so that the yoke bursts over his plate and an orange bead lands on the greasy, chequered oilcloth. He dabs it with his finger.
I’ve kept the advertisement in my handbag for a month. I didn’t think anything would come of it; the opportunity seemed too niche, too unlikely, too convenient. GOVERNESS REQUIRED, FAMILY HALL NR. POLCREATH, IMMEDIATE APPOINTMENT. I spied it during a sandwich break, in the back of the county paper Mrs Wilson brought home from a long weekend in the South West.
I unfold it and read it again. There really isn’t any other information, nothing about the people I would be working for or for how long the position might be. I question if this isn’t what drew me towards the prospect in the first place. My life used to be full of uncertainties: each day was uncertain, each sunrise and sunset one that we didn’t expect to see; each night, while we waited for the bombs to drop and the gunfire to start, was extra time we had somehow stumbled into. Uncertainty kept me alive, knowing that the moment I was in couldn’t possibly last for ever and the next would soon be here, a moment of change, of newness, the ground shifting beneath my feet and moving me forward. At Quakers Oatley, the ground sticks fast, so fast I feel myself drowning.
The tea turns tepid, the deep cracked brown of a terracotta pot, and a fleck of milk powder floats depressingly on its surface. The man next to me grins, flips out his newspaper: India Wins Independence: British Rule Ends. I sense him about to speak and so stand before he can, buttoning my coat and checking my reflection in the smeared window. I pull open the café door, its chime offering a weak ring.
There it is, then. No. 46. Across the road, the genteel townhouse bears down, its glossy black door and polished copper bell push like a delicately wrapped present that my fumbling fingers are desperate, yet fearful, to open. Before we begin, it has me on the back foot. I need it more than it needs me. This job is my ticket out of London, away from the past, away from my secrets. This job is escape.
*
‘Welcome, Miss Miller. Do please sit down.’
I peel off my gloves and set them neatly on the desk before changing my mind and scooping them into my bag. I set the bag on my lap, then have nowhere to put my hands, so I place the bag on the floor, next to my ankles.
He doesn’t appear to notice this display, or perhaps he is too polite to acknowledge it. Instead, he takes a file from the drawer and flicks through it for several moments. The top of his head, as he bends, is bald, and clean as a marble.
‘Thank you for meeting us at short notice,’ he says, with a quick smile. ‘My client, as you’ll understand, prefers to be discreet, and often that means securing results swiftly. We would prefer to resolve the appointment as soon as possible.’
‘Of course.’
‘You have experience with children?’
‘I used to nanny our neighbours’ infants, before the war.’
He nods. ‘My client’s children require tutelage as well as pastoral care. We are concerned with the curriculum but also with a comprehensive education in nature, the arts, sports and games – and, naturally, refinement of etiquette and propriety.’
I sit straighter. ‘Naturally.’
‘The twins are eight years old.’ His eyes meet mine for the first time, sharp and glassy as a crow’s.
‘Very good.’
‘I’m afraid this isn’t the sort of position you can abandon after a month,’ he says. ‘If you find it a challenge, you can begin your instruction by teaching these children the knack of perseverance.’ He puts his fingers together. ‘I mention this because my client lost his last governess suddenly and without warning.’
‘Oh.’
‘As a widower, he has understandably struggled. These are difficult times.’
I’m surprised. ‘Did his wife die recently?’
Immediately I know I have spoken out of turn. I am not here to question this man; he is here to question me. My interest is unwelcome.
‘Tell me, Miss Miller,’ he says, bypassing my enquiry with ease, ‘what occupation did you hold during the war?’
‘I volunteered with the WVS.’
The man teases the end of his moustache. ‘Nurturing yet capable: would that be a fair assessment?’
‘I’d suggest the two aren’t mutually exclusive.’
He writes something down.
‘Have you always lived in London?’
‘I grew up in Surrey.’
‘And attended which school…?’
‘Burstead.’
His eyebrow snags, impressed but not liking to show it. I know my education was among the finest in the country. My mother was schooled at Burstead, and my grandmother before that. There was never any question that my parents would send me there. I tighten my fists in my lap, remembering my father’s face over that Sunday lunch in 1940. The ticking of the mantle clock, the shaft of winter sunlight that bounced off the table, the smell of burned fruit crumble… His rage when I told him what I had done. That the educatio
n they had bought for me had instead brought a nightmare to their door. The sound of smashing glass as my mother walked in, letting the tumbler fall, shattering into a thousand splinters on the treacle-coloured carpet.
He clears his throat, tapping the page with his pen. I see my own handwriting.
‘In your letter,’ he says, ‘you say you are keen to move away from the city. Why?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ I answer a little indecorously, because this is easy, this is what he expects to hear. ‘I would never care to repeat the things I have seen or done over the past six years. The city holds no magic for me any more.’
He sees my automatic answer for what it is.
‘But you, personally,’ he presses, those eyes training into me again. ‘I am interested in what makes you want to leave.’
A moment passes, an open door, the person on each side questioning if the other will walk through – before it closes. The man sits forward.
‘You might deem me improper,’ he says, ‘but my inquests are made purely on my client’s behalf. We understand that the setting of your new appointment is a far cry from the capital. Are you used to isolation, Miss Miller? Are you accustomed to being on your own?’
‘I am very comfortable on my own.’
‘My client needs to know if you have the vigour for it. As I said previously, he does not wish to be hiring a third governess in a few weeks’ time.’
‘I’ve no doubt.’
‘Therefore, if you will forgive my impudence, could you reassure us that you have no medical history of mental disturbances?’
‘Disturbances?’
‘Depressive episodes, attacks of anxiety, that sort of thing.’
I pause. ‘No.’
‘You cannot reassure us, or you can that you haven’t?’
For the first time, there is the trace of a smile. I am almost there. Almost. I don’t have to tell him the truth. I don’t have to tell him anything.
‘I can reassure you that I am perfectly well,’ I say, and it trips off my tongue as smoothly as my name.
The man assesses me, then squares the paper in front of him and replaces it in its folder. When he leans back in his chair, I hear the creak of leather.