‘Why serve breakfast at eight when the master is up at seven?’ she enquires when I share the household timetable. ‘Bedtime is strict and no stories, it only gives them bad dreams.’ Gone were runny eggs on Wednesdays, Edmund’s favourite. ‘They will eat whichever meal I serve them and however I choose to serve it.’ When I tell her about Constance’s sleepwalking, she locks the twins’ door. ‘That will keep her inside. Children need boundaries, Miss Miller; I would have thought you knew that.’
The children embrace this new rigidity – they seem to welcome it, even. Privately I know they will tire of it. In asserting their fondness for Mrs Rackstile, they continue to penalise me. They obey the austerity of their new housekeeper as if she were their father, with the same deference and dread. In loving them and showing that love, I have robbed myself of their respect. They no longer take me seriously. My reprimands fall on deaf ears, as does my praise. They do not care what I think.
*
On Sunday, Mrs Rackstile takes the children to church. I plead a headache and remain at Winterbourne, hoping that Jonathan will stay with me, but to my shock and dismay he elects to accompany the group. Has his faith returned? Or is the prospect of meeting a god he does not believe in easier than the prospect of meeting me?
Alone in the house, with only the steady drip-drip of the scullery sink that needs to be fixed, I decide what it is I must do. For so long I have been thrown the scraps of Laura de Grey’s existence – her elegant looking glass, her beautiful horse, her handsome clock, her lashings of black hair and the powder-softness of her skin – but I am hungry for a feast. With the house empty, I have my opportunity.
Laura possesses me. I am as enamoured with this dead woman as I am with her living husband. She is everything that I am not. She has everything that, even in death, I crave. When I stand at her mirror, I feel myself transforming. I am not the wisp that Mrs Rackstile thinks I am; neither am I the distrustful, weakened woman I fear I have become. I can be like Laura. I can spray her scents and wear her clothes. I can show Mrs Rackstile what the mistress of this house looks like.
Winter has rendered the cellar less habitable than ever. Banks of snow heap against the windows, blocking what scant light still finds a way in. The walls ooze moisture, and where it has frozen is mottled and smooth. I fear the leaks from the low ceiling will snuff my candle, but I make it to the little door with the flame still dancing brightly. The access is open as we left it last and I crouch to get inside.
Hesitant light flickers across the remains of Winterbourne’s mistress – those few possessions that the children sat among, the possessions that made the dog Tipper afraid – and it is less than I thought. There are a few framed pictures, one of which presents a simply rendered jar of lilies: its reverse reveals a girlish signature, Laura Hensley. So that was her maiden name. Hensley. She would have been brought up in a sweet house with a white gate and laurel hedges down the drive. She’d have had a grey, long-haired cat (I had always wanted a cat); her bedroom would have been pink and cream, like meringue, with delicately crocheted quilts and pillows on the window seat. Her parents would have smothered her in kisses. All her life, Laura Hensley was adored. There is a box full of dresses. Jewellery. A bottle of perfume, which I dare to pocket and which is perhaps my most treasured find, for at night I can douse myself in it and smell my body as if it were hers. I consider that Laura’s items have been saved, but by whom – by Jonathan? Did he attribute significance to every artifact or was the collection amassed in a rash of grief, grasping what he could of Laura at random, too heartbroken to think straight? I wish I could have helped him; I’d have relished the chance to be here and to comfort him, to take whatever load I could of his suffering.
There is a photograph, which I snatch and hold to the flame to see clearly.
I both love and detest it at once. Jonathan and Laura on their wedding day, the day Miss Hensley became Mrs de Grey. Of course, beauty is what I expected. The cloud of dark hair, the almond eyes, the heart-shaped face. I trace that face now with my fingertips, and it is her I gaze at for a long time before I even turn to Jonathan. I do not recognise the captain as the man I know now. He is young and unmarked, a less compelling version. Laura is the one who fascinates, Laura in her white dress, Laura smiling widely at the world. I cannot help but compare it with the photograph Tom took of the four of us outside Winterbourne before Mrs Yarrow left. We had felt like a unit, then, as loving a couple as the one depicted here. Only our version was false. Even Mrs Yarrow didn’t want it. When Tom telephoned to ask after her address so that he could send it on, Mrs Yarrow said no, she had no desire to receive it.
Seeing Laura on her wedding day reminds me of the drawing the twins made of me when I first arrived. They sketched me in a bridal gown like this one, a delicate veil and flowers in my hair. Did you want me to be her? I wonder of them.
For why else would they have encouraged me so? All along, the children have steered me towards a belief that I might one day step into that beautiful woman’s shoes, that I might claim the captain as my husband and this house as my own.
They made me believe in my future here, in true love…
My weakness to be wanted: my pathetic, throbbing heart.
For a time I remain in the cellar, no longer feeling the cold.
*
‘On a boat called Old Lymer, down at Polcreath Hollow…’
The single blessing of Mrs Rackstile’s arrival is that, after completing their Sunday prep, the children can take a session with her and the afternoon is my own. What lessons of mine does she seek to unravel? How does she wish to exert her influence on the wards I have shaped as my own? The little girl in the painting was a warning: I see it now. She was trying to warn me that evil was on its way.
‘I’m going out,’ I tell the housekeeper. ‘I’ll be back in time for tea.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Is it your concern?’
‘Everything that happens in this house is my concern.’
I pull up the collar of my coat. ‘It’s just as well that I’m leaving it, then.’
Mrs Rackstile frowns. She looks about to say more, but I go before she can. As I cross to the cliffs and begin the stumble down to the beach, holding my hat to stop it whipping away, I consider it cannot be far: the man Marlin had walked it that day, and probably many days since. The tide is out, the beach empty. Sprawls of seaweed are washed up on the sand, while jagged rocks poke through like molars, rotten and glistening. The weeds are slick and dark, snarled in shallow pits.
I follow the shoreline in Marlin’s direction, keeping tight to the cliffs. Their scale dwarfs me, a lone figure hurrying along their base, and the beach seems never-ending. The wind stings my ears. My legs burn. At last, Polcreath Hollow comes into view. It is no more than a shelf of rock with a single boat moored there, a wooden, humble craft. I see its name painted in white down one flank: OLD LYMER.
It is awkward getting off the beach and down on to the ridge of rock. I hear barking and one of the low-backed, long-tailed dogs emerges on deck, growling at me. I smell of Winterbourne, I think. He can smell it on me.
‘Come on, you devil!’ Marlin emerges from the boat and takes the dog by the scruff, then, noticing its point of interest, squints at me. When we met before, I didn’t see Marlin clearly because of his sou’wester. Now, in the light of day, he appears more ordinary. The sharp, darting eyes I associated with madness regard me evenly.
‘I need to speak to you,’ I say.
*
Over the past weeks I have become accustomed to cavernous spaces and whistling halls. The simplicity of Old Lymer, with its known parameters and gentle movement, is comforting. Marlin orders me to sit by the stove. At his command the dogs lie like sphinxes on their tattered rugs, their paws in front, their heads erect, tongues panting. The galley is a mess with scarcely any visible surfaces, and the camp bed is unmade. ‘I don’t have visitors,’ says Marlin in his thick West Country accent. ‘It is what
it is.’
‘I wish to speak with you about Laura,’ I say.
Marlin sits opposite me. ‘You don’t beat around, do you?’
‘When we met,’ I press, ‘you said there was something bad at Winterbourne. A bad spirit. That your dogs could sense it and so could you.’
Marlin smiles. ‘And now you know it’s true.’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ I say. ‘But terrible things have happened.’ My throat dries. ‘The children, they’re…’ In a rush I want to echo Mrs Yarrow’s words to me. They’re playing tricks. They’re toying with me. Don’t you hear their laughter?
‘The children what?’
I shake my head. Close my eyes. Marlin voices what I cannot.
‘The children are in bed with it,’ he says quietly. ‘Is that what you mean?’
How can I think such a thing? But I do! I do think it!
The footprints in the snow, the woman on the cliff, the marks on my skin, the giggling, the whispering, the scheming, the wide eyes that turn too sharply to glint…
Who are they protecting? Who do they love more than me?
‘Is it Laura?’ I whisper. I watch my hands in the stovelight, cracked and cold, turn them to fists and remember the twins’ fists as they battered the kitchen window.
We couldn’t get in! We tried and tried!
Marlin shakes his head. The stove crackles. ‘There was a bad thing at Winterbourne long before Laura,’ he says. ‘That’s what got her.’
‘How?’ My voice is ragged, desperate. ‘Tell me, please, how did she die?’
The water laps beneath us. The dogs pant.
‘She hanged herself,’ he says.
I imagine Laura’s throat, perfectly white, with the coarse string tight around it. I imagine her stumbling towards her fate, just as Constance stumbles in sleep, her bare feet dragging on the floorboards, her heart leaden with turmoil.
‘She hanged herself right there in the passage, choked to death on a rope.’
An image enters my mind, a flickering image, of Constance in the hallway, looking up at the ceiling. The girl’s pale neck, as pale as her mother’s…
‘They locked her away, so the rumour goes,’ says Marlin. ‘That man up there locked ’is own wife away, trapped her in that place day and night seeing no one. He feared she was mad but ’e drove her mad, that’s what they say. He put her in a room and buried the key. Poor old Laura de Grey. He drove that lady to an early grave.’
I shake my head. ‘There must have been a reason,’ I say, thinking how Jonathan would have tried to protect her. ‘Laura lost her mind after the children were born, I’ve heard of it happening; it happens to healthy women. He was concerned.’
‘He was concerned, all right,’ says Marlin, ‘and you’re right, it was after she had those twins. Laura couldn’t cope, that’s how they tell it. Laura didn’t love them. Laura didn’t like them. They say she did at first, but then whatever fiend’s got hold of Winterbourne made sure she lost her mind, and took her own life thereafter. Your captain came out of one war and right into another. He got fright she’d harm them.’
‘He thought he was helping? He thought by locking her up he could save her?’
Marlin tests me with those eyes of his; tests how far I will go with him, how much I am willing to believe. ‘You seem awful keen to make a martyr of him,’ he observes. ‘But the story goes that your master i’n’t quite the innocent, miss. I see it in his eyes: it’s guilt, plain as a cloudless day. He thinks those deaths at Winterbourne are his fault, and maybe they are. Who’s to say Laura would’ve died if he hadn’t forced her into solitary? Or that other woman, the one before you, they say he scorned her and that’s why she did what she did. But make no mistake: whatever’s in that house was always going to get them, whether he helped it or not. That’s what it does. It wants the women, see, Miss Miller. Every woman who’s set foot in that place with hopes of becoming its mistress has come to her end. Laura got further than most, but that’s what it likes to do.’ He grins horribly. ‘It makes you believe it first.’
‘I won’t accept it! I can’t!’
‘It uses the children to get what it wants. Children are soft, see, they get moulded any way it likes. It tells them what to do, and they do it.’
‘I reject this; you must not speak any more—’
‘Reject it at your peril, for it’s the women it wants. Some say it’s the spirit of a spurned old witch. She sends the women mad, see, mad with love, with passion, with hate, with what came out of their wombs, mad to their deaths—’
I stand, unable to hear any more. I cannot! I will not. I stagger from the boat, sick with the rocking of the sea, and grab the ladder that will take me back to land, safe land, dry land, with none of these hideous imaginings!
‘You know you can’t run from it,’ Marlin calls after me, his words snatched by the bitter wind. ‘The curse’ll catch up wi’ you eventually. You came here; you came to me, so I think you know. I think you’re fright it’s doing the same to you.’
I shakily climb the rotten, weed-coated ladder, my vision blurred, black water rolling menacingly beneath my feet. I haul myself up on the rocky shelf, but when I look up at the sheer cliff and the wild beach and the destination that waits for me, the clamouring siren of Winterbourne, I wish to plunge into the water and never return.
‘Listen,’ says Marlin, standing on the deck with his three dogs. I am anxious to deem him insane, hear his lunatic words and see his senseless eyes and throw all I have listened to deep into the ocean, but he watches me steadily.
‘You get as far from Winterbourne as you can,’ he warns. ‘Get far away from him and away from the de Greys. Because if you don’t, you’ll be next.’
Chapter 29
Cornwall, present day
The rest of the week passed decisively for Rachel. She kept the magazine that Aaron had brought on the chest in the hall, a reminder every time she passed it of the life to which she was set to return. She couldn’t spend her future trapped in her past.
Aaron contacted a new realtor about valuing the estate. Despite her initial misgivings, Rachel was grateful for his optimistic companionship. Could she return his feelings, in time? Could she learn to allow him close, even to fall in love with him? On paper Aaron was easy to love – gorgeous, generous, smart, successful – but she’d never considered it before. It hadn’t been part of their arrangement, and felt too much like a betrayal of Seth. But as she watched him sort through boxes, as he fixed her meals, as she felt him tenderly rub her shoulders at the end of a tough day, slowly she could start to envisage what their lives might be like together. It would be easy to say yes to him, to be loved and looked after, to share her hopes and fears, to have someone to make breakfast with in the mornings, just as she had when she was married. For this time at Winterbourne, they were that couple. They laughed and talked over late-night suppers; they walked along the bluff after hours cooped up.
Suddenly Aaron didn’t seem so at odds with Winterbourne. He appeared less tightly wound, more relaxed, more encouraged somehow. She supposed that, after all, he knew her best. She could talk herself into loving him. She could.
When the realtor visited, Rachel spent several hours showing him round Winterbourne and its grounds, then discussing her situation and her intention to shift the property from abroad. ‘Of course, Ms Wright,’ said the realtor, fawningly. ‘Rest assured we will look after everything, from viewings through offers through auctions – because there will be an auction – right to contracts, and we’ll keep you informed every step of the way.’ Rachel chewed her thumb. She asked about prospective buyers’ objectives: could they ask for an indication of how the successful bidder would handle the house? Would they demolish it or extend it; would they put a swimming pool out where the old stables used to be, or a gym in the chapel? She struggled to imagine change and felt protective of the place. ‘I guess I just want to feel it’s going to the right people,’ she said, and the realtor smiled his fo
ppish smile and told her that they would do everything they could to manage her wish. When he asked a little pertly if she wouldn’t prefer to stay at Winterbourne herself, Aaron stepped up behind and put a hand on Rachel’s shoulder: ‘She wants to sell,’ he said.
Rachel was grateful to Aaron for maintaining her focus. She dreamed of a young family buying the house, of children’s laughter filling the rooms, but knew it was unlikely. More probably it would go to a developer who would raze it to the ground and build a block of apartments. Still, she couldn’t afford to be sentimental.
She and Aaron spent their days carefully packing up, sorting and signing paperwork, combing through the details together even when Rachel’s eyes were ready to close and Aaron had to all but put the pen in her hand. Much of Winterbourne’s contents would be sent to auction, but certain items Rachel wished to take with her: a delicate gold bracelet she decided to believe belonged to her grandmother; an elegant silver clock engraved with the letters L. Until the end of time, and, of course, the diaries her aunt had kept, haphazardly arranged inside that boarding-school trunk.
‘What about that thing?’ Aaron asked one evening, as he passed the mirror by the fireplace. He fingered its ornate gothic frame, somewhat uneasily, and then laughed at his reflection. ‘Not all that flattering, is it?’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Rachel. ‘Never have.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘My aunt’s, I expect. Though I don’t know for sure.’
‘You’re not taking it, then?’
‘God, no. The mirror belongs at Winterbourne. I can’t picture it anywhere else. I feel as if the house would be furious if I tried to take it away.’
*
Aaron was up early on the day of their flight, loading their travel bags into the Porsche. Rachel stayed a while in her bedroom, watching him out on the drive.