Charlotte didn’t lash back, because it was, frankly, a stupid thought. She didn’t need saving. And why would a woman fantasize about being rescued at all?
With Mr. Mallery beside her and a lit candle in her hand, Charlotte led the way up the main staircase, down the hall to the spiral stairs, and up to the mysterious second floor. She took the candle from Colonel Andrews and examined the hall.
“There was a door here. I remember going past the table …” She shoved her shoulder against the wall. Nothing.
A door across the hallway opened. Mary peered out, her pallid skin and hair absorbing the tint of the dark, making her seem a ghostly blue.
“Mary, is this your bedchamber?” asked Mr. Mallery.
Mary nodded. Her large, unblinking eyes didn’t leave his face.
“Good. Mrs. Cordial is a bit upset. Can you tell us if there is a room on this floor that is …”
He looked to Charlotte for more information.
“It’s filled with furniture,” said Charlotte. “And boxes and stuff.”
Mary pointed to the other doors. “That’s Kitty’s and Tillie’s room, there’s Edgar’s and Hamilton’s—”
“Not a bedroom,” said Charlotte. “Like a storage room.”
Mary shook her head. She still hadn’t looked away from Mr. Mallery.
“Thank you, Mary,” he said.
She offered him a brief, hopeful smile then slowly shut her door.
Colonel Andrews yawned. “Well, good jest, Mrs. Cordial. I think our game has beat me. I am off for some shut-eye. You all go on without me.”
“No!” said Charlotte too loudly. She checked herself. “I mean, I’m tired too.”
“As am I,” said Mr. Mallery.
They all agreed and made their way downstairs, Charlotte and Mr. Mallery going a bit slower than the rest.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I was … I don’t know.”
“Mrs. Cordial, I do not care to hear an apology from you. You are the one coerced into running blind through an unfamiliar house. In the dining room, I should have realized that you were genuinely agitated. I should have put a stop to this before it went too far.”
He thinks I’m crazy, she thought. He thinks I was so terrified of the game that I imagined a dead body in a disappearing room.
And perhaps, in fact, she had.
Mr. Mallery stopped on the landing and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“I feel like an idiot, but I’m fine.”
“Get some sleep. And I promise you a more peaceful day tomorrow.”
He took her arm, walked her to her chamber door, bowed, and left.
Colonel Andrews lingered at Miss Charming’s door, whispering. He kissed her hand before departing to his room. Miss Charming placed a hand on her bosom and sighed.
“ ’Night, Mrs. Cordial.”
“Goodnight.” Charlotte stayed where she was. Outside her circle of candlelight, the house was excessively dark, and in the wind it creaked like a ship. Charlotte pictured the night as an ocean, and imagined that she alone was floating in that vastness. Lost at sea in the midst of a storm.
Miss Charming popped her head back out her door. “Hey, Charlotte?”
“Hm?” Charlotte took a few steps closer, only too glad to stall in the presence of another human.
“Do I look pale to you? Kind of sickly, like I’ve been half-choked or something?”
“No … why?”
“Because you do, and I wondered if everyone looks like that in candlelight.”
Charlotte laughed. “I really, really spooked myself tonight.”
Miss Charming gestured for Charlotte to follow. “Come on, honey lamb. There’s room for two in my bed. Nothing hokey—I don’t swing, thanks. You just look like a sad little puppy tonight.”
“You don’t mind?” Charlotte ran back to her room, shivering as she entered the darkness, as if she’d passed through a cold, wet veil. She grabbed her nightgown from a hook in her bathroom and was back in Miss Charming’s room in a flash.
“My kids …” Charlotte stopped, knowing she wasn’t supposed to speak about the real world. She chose her words carefully, so that she might have been speaking as Mrs. Cordial. “My children are of sturdier stuff than I am. When she was little, my girl loved thunderstorms, and I’d pretend to as well so that I wouldn’t scare her. But sometimes I wished she was a little scared so she’d snuggle in bed with me at night.”
Miss Charming sniffed. “I’m not offering a snuggle.”
Charlotte smiled. “I accept all the same.”
“You sleep left or right?”
James had slept on the right, Charlotte cramped up on the left, afraid to move and disturb his fragile sleep. “You point to a spot, and I’ll sleep there all night without so much as a snort or rustle.”
Miss Charming put her hands on her hips. “Is that right?”
“If I have one superpower, Miss Charming, it’s silent, motionless sleep. You’d almost think me dead.”
“Well, if we’re going to sleep together, Mrs. Cordial, you’d better call me ‘Lizzy.’ ”
They took turns helping each other out of dress and corset and jumped into bed. Charlotte pulled the covers up to her chin. A giggle started in her belly and tickled up her throat.
“What’s funny?” Miss Charming asked, giggling too, as if she couldn’t help herself.
“I haven’t had a sleepover in … I don’t know, almost thirty years.” Had her brother-in-mask birthday party been the last? In retrospect, it had felt ominously final.
“Me too. Or in ten years anyway. Since I’m only twenty-eight.”
“Oh,” said Charlotte. She hadn’t realized they could fudge their age as well as their name. Age seemed like such an indisputable thing, something branded into the wrinkle between her eyes. If she was in a place where a woman of fifty could just say, “I’m twenty-eight,” then what else was possible?
They said goodnight, and Miss Charming blew out her candle. Charlotte rolled onto her side, and the good feeling the laugh had traced through her dissolved into the dark behind her lids. She saw again the handlike image flashing in the pop of lightning. A gray hand irradiated by moonlight, mysterious, neither feminine nor masculine. A hand was unmistakably human.
Had she been mistaken? No. Impossible. But then, where had the storage room gone? The uncertainty made her want to pace. She hugged the blanket to her chest.
All through the night, each time her thoughts peeked into consciousness, she saw again the hand, felt it in memory, and opened her eyes, sure she would see a ghostly figure in the room, watching her. Sometimes the figure wore a monk’s robe, like in the painting on the second floor. Sometimes it was missing a hand.
It’s hard to get much sleep when you’re checking for a menacing presence every twenty to thirty minutes. It’s also hard to sleep next to Miss Charming when she’s on her back. Either her snores or the wind rattled the window. Then, as Charlotte lay awake trying to paint the darkness in happy sunshine and rainbows, she heard a thud from outside. She slid carefully from the bed and tiptoed to the window.
The rain had stopped, but the night was wet and cloudy, with no moonlight to glint on the puddles and shaking leaves. She stared, trying to determine the source of the noise. It hadn’t been a sharp sound, like a falling roof tile. It hadn’t been flat, like a slamming door. It was a thud, like something heavy but not breakable dropping onto the front walk below. But she couldn’t make out anything in the dark and gave up, returning restlessly to Miss Charming’s bed.
Around five in the morning, gray light replaced black, and Charlotte found she could keep her eyes shut and sleep.
I didn’t know I was so scared of the dark, she thought as she began to drift. I didn’t know I still believed in monsters.
Home, ten months before
Charlotte sat on a love seat in her family room, the mail strewn around her, and stared at the wedding announcement. James’s
mistress-soon-to-be-wife was named Justice. The glazed ivory card stock and cursive raised lettering slapped so much dignity on the name that it seemed to mock it.
Emotional responses aside, let’s be careful not to vilify Justice. Just because she had a prolonged sexual affair with another woman’s husband doesn’t mean she was rotten to the core. Here’s a woman who donated all her discarded clothing to the Salvation Army—why, she even boxed up her old, stained Tupperware and empty egg cartons in case schoolchildren wanted them for crafts projects. She knit scarves. She drove slowly through duck crossings. She observed Yom Kippur even though she wasn’t technically Jewish.
As a general rule, Charlotte loved her fellow human being. So in a gesture of acceptance, Charlotte pinned the announcement to the corkboard. Then Charlotte pinned a flyer from a yoga studio over it. Thank goodness she was still numb.
Justice …
Austenland, day 6
If there had been a body, then whose was it?
Charlotte sat at her vanity as Mary did her hair. Mary’s movements were skittery, and yet her eyes were always wide open, looking around. Little happened that she would miss.
“Will all the guests be at breakfast today?”
“I believe so, ma’am.” Mary had a high voice. It scraped the ceiling.
“And what of the staff …”
“Ma’am?” Her expression was smooth, but her voice remained suspiciously squeaky.
“It just seems like someone is missing. For some reason. Did anyone … leave the manor recently?” Or get offed and stuffed in a disappearing room?
“Not that I know of, ma’am.”
Mary caught Charlotte watching her in the mirror and looked away.
Dressed and fitted up, Charlotte started to head down the stairs for breakfast in the dining room. But then, looking back to make sure no one observed her, she hurried to the spiral stairs instead.
Truth is rarely more horrible than imagination, she told herself.
Then she started imagining scenarios where the truth really was more horrible. That’s a thought cycle that never ends well.
The second-floor corridor seemed narrower in the daylight. It was the darkness itself that had made the corridor seem cavernous, filled with frights from her own overactive brain.
Pipe down, brain, Charlotte commanded. I blame mystery novels for your bad manners.
As she left the safety of the stairs, goose bumps prickled her arms. She took silent, careful steps down the hall, passing the table with the empty vase. The entrance to the room would be between the table and the next bedroom. The wainscoting created panels about the height of a door. She pushed against a panel, then the next, the next—
“Skulking back to the scene of the crime?”
Charlotte spun around. Eddie was coming up the stairs. Even his slight, surprised-looking smile brought out those dimples. He had such a harmless face.
“Eddie,” she breathed. “Don’t do that.”
“You look positively criminal, Charlotte. Are you sneaking sweets? Have you drawn on the walls or perhaps spilled your juice on the carpet?”
Charlotte let her shoulders relax. “If I did, would I get a spanking?”
Eddie raised a single eyebrow.
“Whoa!” said Charlotte, feeling a blush come on. “That’s not what I meant. I was trying to keep with your naughty-child theme, not add another kind of naughty something or other. Sorry, brother of mine.”
She giggled, then covered her mouth, not sure if she should appear more penitent.
Eddie narrowed his eyes. “What are you up to?”
She glanced up the hallway. The far window seemed to sink back even farther, the light barely shuffling down the hall.
“Come with me. I’d rather not do this alone.”
He approached slowly, his feet reluctant. “I don’t know if I should encourage this fancy of yours.”
“It’s already encouraged. It’s beyond encouraged. Just help me resolve it, if you would be so kind.”
She continued pushing on the wall as she went, feeling for give. “It can’t have been a normal door. There must be a disguised door here somewhere.”
“A secret door? Charlotte—”
“I know you all thought I was crazy, and I was ready to believe you. But by daylight, I don’t feel crazy. There’s got to be—aha! Here, push,” she said, taking his hands and placing them on one wall panel.
“See how it feels kind of … loose? A little bit?”
She stood with her back against the wall and slid along it, as she had been doing the night before, feeling for a lever or switch. He laughed.
“I wanted you here so you could help.”
“Actually, I believe you wanted me to protect you from the Pembrook Phantom.”
“Maybe.” She tried to sound cheeky, but truthfully she really didn’t appreciate him throwing around words like “phantom” while she was in a dim corridor looking for a secret passageway. Her goose bumps were getting goose bumps.
Then she felt it—a kind of knob, hidden in the wainscot. She flicked it with her finger. The wall at her back swung in.
She almost fell back again, but Eddie grabbed her arm and pulled her upright. His wide eyes took in the room behind her.
“See? See? I’m not completely crazy.”
“Not completely,” he whispered and went in, his hands together as if he were entering a holy sanctum, or perhaps Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Charlotte followed. The door shut behind them, making them both jump.
“It does that,” said Charlotte. “But I don’t like it that it does that. In fact, I wish that it wouldn’t do that. I really wish that it—” She shut herself up because she realized she was rambling, and she realized she was rambling because the secret room did in fact exist. Which also meant …
Charlotte met eyes with the sofa. That is, if the sofa had eyes, she would have met eyes with it. As it was, she just had the creepy sensation that it knew she was looking at it. Which of course it didn’t. It was just a sofa, after all. A sofa that seemed to have eyes, and if it did have eyes, it would be glaring—kind of smugly. A smug kind of glare.
She was still rambling, even in her thoughts.
Shut up, Charlotte, she told herself.
She pointed at the sofa. “It was there.”
Eddie didn’t speak. Perhaps if he had, he would have rambled too. Instead, he approached the sofa cautiously (almost as if the sofa had eyes and Eddie didn’t like the way it was smugly glaring) and lifted the velvet coverlet.
Nobody. No body at all. Not even a severed hand.
Charlotte’s relief was chased from her chest by an aggressive stampede of disappointment and confusion.
“But … there was … I swear …”
Eddie looked around. “I don’t know that we should be here. This is a bit of an underbelly, isn’t it? Like seeing backstage.”
“But it’s real, Eddie. Everyone thought I was crazy, but the room is real.”
He nodded, eyeing the wobbly stacks of chairs and old sofas with ripped covers. He knelt at a box and pulled out a fencing foil with stubbed tip.
“Ooh,” he said.
Charlotte examined the velvet coverlet and what wasn’t underneath it. She shut her eyes and saw again the hand, lit up silver by the well-timed lightning. It had been real, just like the room. Right? There was nothing on the sofa now but the coverlet, and its fringe could hardly imitate five fingers and a palm.
“I’m sure I saw … I touched it.” Her stomach squelched. “Oops. Excuse me.”
Eddie put back the foil. “Come along, Charlotte darling, I will escort you to breakfast. Breakfast should always come before sleuthing.” He went to the door … or what was an outline of a door. There was no knob.
“How exactly do we extract ourselves from the belly of the beast?”
“I’m not sure.” She studied the wall. “It was dark. And I think I was, well, flailing around.”
The wainscot was carved. She
pressed it until she found a rounded bit that gave way under her hand, and the door swung in.
“Look out—that is alarming each time,” said Eddie.
The door clicked shut behind them. They’d just taken a step toward the stairs when a non-secret door opened and Mary peered out. She saw them, and her face turned very red.
“Hello, Mary,” said Charlotte.
“I’m … I’m in my room,” she said and shut herself back in.
“She’s perpetually jumpy,” Charlotte whispered.
“Let us keep the secret room a secret, shall we, Charlotte?” said Eddie, taking her arm and walking to the stairs. “Mrs. Wattlesbrook does not like guests to see anything dusty or untidy.”
“But … we should call the police. The secret room is real! So that must mean the body was real too.”
He took her hand and looked at her with concern.
He has brown eyes, she thought. So does my real brother. But Eddie’s have more honey in them.
“Are you certain, Charlotte? Are you absolutely certain you encountered a murdered human being last night?”
Yes! She was! They’d been playing Bloody Murder in a dark and creepy old house and she’d fallen into a secret room and naturally there’d been a dead body. Well, she’d only seen the hand. Now that she thought about it, the hand had felt odd. Not that she’d ever encountered a real corpse before, but did they all feel so … so rubbery? It had seemed to be attached to something, and she’d assumed it had been a body, and again had assumed that the deceased person had been murdered and hidden away. Wow, she had assumed quite a bit. But if it hadn’t been real, then why was it gone? Why would someone put a prop corpse on a couch in a secret room and then move it between midnight and morning?
“I … think so.”
“Mrs. Wattlesbrook is sensitive. If you call the police, and they come search the house and find nothing, well, it will be disruptive and very hard on her. I just want you to be certain.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Maybe I should just talk to her first.”
He nodded and, seeing she intended to go about her business immediately, went to the dining room alone.