The Golden Key

by Marian Womack

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for the Golden Key

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Book Club Questions

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR THE GOLDEN KEY

  ‘With hints of the brooding Gothic of Rawblood and Rebecca, this wonderfully creepy historical novel makes it absolutely clear that Marian Womack is a rising star.’

  Tim Major, author of Snakeskins

  ‘An intriguing and unsettling tale of séances, strange lights, disappearing children and a poacher who swears he has seen the devil in the marshes… Womack brings a great sense of the uncanny to the Fens.’

  Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season

  ‘Graceful, moving, confident and intricate, like slipping into a warm bath and finding secret thorns there to pierce the heart’

  Catherynne M. Valente, Locus Award-winning author of Space Opera and Deathless

  ‘A beguiling mystery that lingers long after reading, much like the unsettling mists of the Fens that creep through this story. The Golden Key mesmerises, offers a door to another world – one which casts an uncanny light on our own self-destruction.’

  Katherine Stansfield, author of Falling Creatures

  ‘A fey, unsettling vision of Norfolk, and London, that fans of The Essex Serpent will love. A compelling mystery in which everyone has hidden facets, this book gives up its secrets like a puzzle box.’

  G.V. Anderson, BFS award-winner of ‘Down Where Sound Comes Blunt’

  ‘A fascinating, unsettling tale that shifts, mutates and changes meaning much like the eerie ruined house in the Fens at the centre of this weird and brilliant debut novel.’

  Lisa Tuttle, author of The Witch at Wayside Cross

  MARIAN WOMACK

  TITAN BOOKS

  THE GOLDEN KEY

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789093254

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093261

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First Titan edition: February 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 Marian Womack. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To Oliver Julius Womack Via

  There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt’s stories.

  She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.

  ‘And what is the key for?’ the boy would ask.

  ‘What is it the key of? What will it open?’

  ‘That nobody knows,’ his aunt would reply.

  ‘He has to find that out.’

  GEORGE MACDONALD,

  The Golden Key (1867)

  Who has not experienced the burning heat of the sun that precedes a summer’s shower?

  EUNICE FOOTE,

  ‘Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays’ (1856)

  CHAPTER ONE

  There are many ways of getting lost. Breadcrumbs can sink into the snow, be eaten by rooks.

  You can be sucked in by the marshes, lose your way on the flatlands. Be spirited away from the narrow footpaths. You could get confused at the imagined frontier of impenetrable dusk that hangs over the Fens, lose sight of the realm of the tangible.

  Samuel Moncrieff had never been lost. For as long as he could remember he had been graced with the intuition that, if you got lost, you might never come back.

  It almost happened once. He felt it, a strange force that pulled at him from the lane that cut between the flatlands. He had gone out for a walk; he could smell the cold, the wet leaves. The little shoots of frozen grass crunched under his feet, and the ground was white with frost.

  Ahead of him, the dark agricultural fenland stretched, eerily flat. For a second the world had lost some of its gravity, its weight.

  He felt suddenly alert, and turned back, pulling with all his might.

  He could not blame the fog, for it happened in that uncertain November twilight, impossibly heavy under its many layers of dusk. One step out of place, that’s all it would have taken. Later, he would hear the expression ‘being pixie-led’; but he himself had no words for such a portent, not then at least. Except for the notion of falling into an inescapable void, the unmistakable sensation of darkness advancing in his direction, intent on devouring him. Like drowning in a pool of stagnant water.

  That day, the day he had almost got lost.

  Was that the day he first saw it, the ruined house that had haunted his childhood dreams?

  The dismal construction had been such a fixture of his nightmares for so many years, and yet had disappeared all of a sudden as soon as he put Norfolk behind him, went off to be educated. Almost every night he had traversed its corridors, looked up at the sky through the collapsed ceiling, dreading, always dreading the approach to that mouldy room at the passage’s end. The house stood on a flat stretch of yellow land. The formal garden had run wild, overgrown, and he could hear a faint murmur of water. Some of the outer walls were blackened, and part of the ceiling was gone. The dim light, flat as the land itself, drew endless unmoving shadows.

  It was a hollow carcass, home to foxes and mice, and to the jackdaws that flew to and fro around its triangular gables. Branches were overhanging the opened rooms, the floors covered in brown dirt, stones, broken pieces of flint. The dreary salons and bedchambers were all livid with mould, so that the fireplaces looked as if they had been painted in many shades of green by a madman. Ivy had crept in through the windows, and fungi of many different colours, shockingly vibrant, spread their silent empire over the walls, painting maps to unknown realms.

  The house spoke of lives coming to abrupt ends, of broken promises. It spoke of endless possibilities, both seen and unseen. Its layers of unmoving time made him uneasy: there was something odd, slightly off-key. You could not hear the birds, the wind rustling. Like a place neither here nor there.

  * * *

  Why had it reappeared now, after all these years, with the inopportune insistence of a long-lost friend one has no time for?

  He knew, deep down, what the house meant. A place to escape to, it came back to him during those first feverish hours without Viola, with its faint aura of a long-lost memory; the river accident had triggered its return. Just as mould and decay covered its imagined walls, so the memory of the house had silently conquered his nightmares, leaving no place for Viola, for the treacherous Isis.

  What Sam could not remember was whether the building was a true memory, or something that he had imagined, part
of some vivid childhood make-believe, a long-forgotten game of hide-and-seek with the shadows. He had no recollection of the property existing in this world. But then, he had been there once, had he not? He could not simply have imagined it, not in all its sumptuous decaying detail.

  Samuel Moncrieff had never been lost, and had never wanted to be. It was different now.

  * * *

  Sam’s arrival in London coincided with the first signs of Christmas. Little lights charmed passers-by from behind cloudy shop windows, and Albert trees sprouted here and there. The festivities welcomed him with their air of a season out of time, and came and went quickly; a sad, subdued affair.

  ‘Samuel, my boy. The only thing we ought to concern ourselves with is your health. I have instructed Mrs Brown to provide for your every need.’ Sam’s godfather, Charles Bale, had a house in Saffron Hill Road, a large number of friends associated with the Spiritualist cause, and too much time on his hands. His robust disposition, cheerful eyes and fondness for amusing company were at odds with his prominent position in one of those societies occupied with exploring the darkest corners of our universe. Bale was one of the most senior members of The New Occultist Defence League, funded some years previously to ‘defend those interested in Spiritual communion from the misunderstanding or aggravation caused by the non-Spiritualist-minded’. Showing a rare delicacy, the older man had not been inquisitive about the tragic accident that had brought Sam to his door. He had asked no questions, and demanded no answers. And so Sam had the chance to gather his breath. London, even if looked out upon from a window, did not look back at him with reproach: a welcome change. College life lay behind him, forever gone. He was capable of admitting that much to himself.

  A few weeks after Sam’s arrival, the Queen’s passing changed the mood of the capital once more. To his godfather’s delight, advertisements now kept sprouting everywhere for lectures on Mesmerism in working men’s clubs, or for assemblies and raffles to gather funds for séances. Victoria’s death had suddenly rekindled the interest in their dusty cause: most of the papers proclaimed new ghostly sightings and bewildering phenomena, usually involving the departed monarch.

  ‘Who knows?’ Charles took to saying with a smile. ‘Her Majesty may, even now, be looking at us from The Beyond.’

  Most visitors to Saffron Hill Road interpreted the black ribbon on Sam’s arm as a mark of respect for Victoria, and he did not set them right. He often heard Charles and his friends discussing what they called the Queen’s ‘promotion’, and admiring the symbolism of her final journey: the crowds in dark mourning, the bright white horses. The monarch had famously made all the preparations herself, in accordance with her well-known interest in the fanfare of death.

  Sam avoided seeing the ominous procession. The incident in the river, still an open wound in his mind, meant that he was not in a humour to witness such an event. And then there was the house: the crumbling walls, soft with lichen; the dense silence welcoming him back. At night he turned in bed left and right, until a feverish sleep found him. And what came to his rescue but this ruin, this thing? It was all there again; so unreal, so recognisable, bringing back no memories, but dark premonitions from the past. Then nothing: his mind filled with black water. Sam longed for only one thing: a night of untroubled sleep. It was one of his uncle’s Spiritualist gazettes that proposed the notion, imbued with dark meaning, of what might be happening, bringing to mind at once the ruined house, the river, Viola, as a melange of connected possibilities:

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY CURE. MAGNETISM IS LIFE!

  WRITE AT ONCE.

  MARVELLOUS CURES.

  ALL SUFFERERS FROM LOSS OF MEMORY, SADNESS, AND ALL NERVOUS AILMENTS, INCLUDING SLEEP ILLNESSES

  Sleep illness. Could that be his affliction?

  What he needed wasn’t a cure for his nightmares, but a potion to help him forget. He knew people who had wandered down to the canalside in Oxford, where the slow Chinese barges sometimes came up from London. They had spoken to him of medicines that could calm the busiest brain, but for some reason he had always rejected these out of hand. What he ought to do was give himself over to the dedicated task of changing the fog inside his head for the London fog, like a self-induced trance. But he wondered: would he be able to do that alone, or would he need a light to guide him? Samuel Moncrieff felt irrevocably lost, for the first time in his life.

  * * *

  It was in this particular mood that Sam re-encountered his Oxford friends Frederick Edgington and James Woodhouse. They passed each other one morning on a busy street during one of Sam’s endless wanderings without direction, zigzagging through the labyrinth of the city. Someone shouted his name and he stopped, unsure if this was happening in real life, or if the sound was coming from somewhere further away, the ruins of his vivid dreams. It was only Freddy, and Viola’s cousin, Jim. They greeted each other, Freddy rather more warmly than quiet Jim. They both wore black armbands. For the Queen? For Viola, in Jim’s case? It was impossible to know, and Sam preferred to avoid the issue. Shortly afterwards they were partaking of a hearty lunch in the booth of a Holborn tavern, thick with wolfish lawyers and monkish clerks. Sam half-listened to Frederick’s assertion that he wasn’t in London illicitly, far from it. His tutor, it appeared, had contracted such severe melancholia after the passing of the monarch that he had taken an indefinite leave of absence, and Freddy had been left to his own devices.

  ‘Taken to his bed, if you please! And so here I am, waiting on what they decide to do with me. A lost Hilary term is the least of it,’ he explained, smiling through his pork pie. Sam said nothing, and took a long draught of his ale. He eyed Jim over his cloudy glass, thankful that Viola’s cousin had chosen not to mention the recent events. Jim had given no explanation for why he had come to the capital. Thankfully, they both seemed to have reached the tacit agreement of allowing Freddy to speak to his heart’s content.

  ‘And what do you gentlemen intend to do?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Dine in style, get acquainted with pretty young things, enjoy the theatres and music halls.’

  After dinner they walked down to the river, and on the embankment they took a tram to the Lambeth Road, where stood one of the seedy establishments upon which Freddy bestowed his patronage. The bright lights of the Waterloo Variety poured their inconsiderate gaudiness over everything, even Sam’s misery. He felt dreadful, seeing the theatre for what it really was. The velvet curtains were black with grime, the floor was littered with cigarette ends. People were loudly chatting, drinking, smoking, clapping. They were coarse people, biting hard on their cigars and laughing too loudly, sipping the bright gilt liquid as they crashed their cheap champagne glasses together. The light and the smoke hung in the air like a shroud. Sam sucked deeply on a cigar he didn’t want, and observed the young women: mostly chancers clad in imitations of expensive outfits, with make-up covering their faces like a carnival mask, and smiles showing rotten teeth. Out of the corner of his eyes Jim moved here and there, talking to people, never going very far from Sam, hovering around him.

  But Freddy had correctly judged the effect this place might have on his friend’s sinking spirits. Barely an hour after crossing the Waterloo’s threshold, Sam was sipping his third glass of sparkling alcohol (it would be a sin to call it champagne). He was convinced that he wouldn’t stay long, that nothing could possibly fill the emptiness inside him; the emptiness from which, before Viola, he had been so blissfully free. But he forced himself to drink up. He allowed Freddy to guide him backstage, where he was introduced to a number of chorus girls. Everywhere there were smiles and noise and thick lavender smells and big teeth. Among the noise, the cigarettes and the pots of cold cream, alcohol and other drugs flowed freely, and he accepted another drink. It was brandy. A little smile tried very hard to curve Sam’s mouth, almost succeeding. He had forgotten this, but he remembered now: there existed very few pains, great or small, that the London night could not muffle.

  * * *

  It would
be backstage at the theatre, of all places, where he would come to meet her, this particular girl who mildly intrigued him. He grew used to finding her in the dressing room, standing very straight among the comings and goings. What had struck him was how elegant she looked under the old-fashioned gas lamps, but he had also detected something slightly off-key about her, something that didn’t quite ring true. She was a seamstress who appeared never to mend anything. No, it wasn’t that, exactly. She was a seamstress who looked like somebody dressed up as a seamstress: the neatness of her clothing, the ‘correctness’ of her demeanour, like a child playing at a profession. One evening, to his surprise, he found the girl sneaking into one of the managers’ offices, opening the door after a careful inspection of the corridor.

  Curiosity won over, and Sam moved slowly towards the slightly opened door to peep inside. The seamstress was diligently going through a sheaf of papers. What could she be doing? Sam’s logical assumption was that she was looking for something to steal.

  He pushed the door open and slowly entered.

  ‘May I ask what you’re doing, miss?’ he interrupted her.

  To his surprise she didn’t have the grace to act like someone caught red-handed. On the contrary, she seemed vexed to see him.

  ‘And you, sir?’ came the astonishing answer. Perhaps even more astonishing was the clear-cut authority of her response. Sam hadn’t had the chance to speak to her and her looks had made him expect an accent of some sort.

  ‘Excuse me? It is you who have crept in here like a sneak, rummaging in this poor fellow’s private documents.’

  To his surprise, the young woman rolled her eyes, sighed deeply, and composed the shadow of a patient smile.

  ‘I am sorry, I truly have no time for this,’ she said, and instantly resumed her search. Sam felt unsure how to continue. That wasn’t the reaction he had expected.