Eglantine

by Catherine Jinks

  CATHERINE JINKS was born in Brisbane in 1963 and grew up in Sydney and Papua New Guinea. She studied medieval history at university, and her love of reading led her to become a writer. She lives in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales with her Canadian husband, Peter, and her daughter, Hannah.

  Catherine Jinks is the author of over twenty books for children and adults, including the award-winning Pagan series.

  CATHERINE JINKS

  First published in 2002

  This edition published in 2007

  Copyright © Catherine Jinks, 2002

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Jinks, Catherine, 1963-.

  Eglantine: a ghost story.

  For children.

  ISBN 9781741146585.

  1. Ghosts – Juvenile fiction. 2. Haunted houses – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  (Series: Jinks, Catherine, 1963- Allie's ghost hunters; 1).

  A823.3

  Cover design by Tabitha King

  Text design by Jo Hunt and Tabitha King

  Set in 13 on 15.5pt Weiss by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Ursula Dubosarsky, who planted the seed

  With special thanks to Janine Bellamy and

  PRISM International

  Contents

  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 # one

  It happened after we bought this house.

  I couldn’t believe that Mum was serious, at first. She’d been going on and on about how wonderful it was, how it had been built in 1886, how it still had its slate roof and two original marble fireplaces . . . that kind of thing. But then, when we got out of the car, we came face to face with this dump. (Half of its windows were boarded up!) It was a terrace house, squashed between two other terrace houses, with a tiny patch of front garden and a sign out the front that said ‘For Sale’. Only it wasn’t for sale any more.

  Mum and Ray had bought it.

  ‘Needs a bit of work,’ said Mum as she opened the front door. ‘Look, kids! Look at the lovely patterns on the ceiling! I’m going to have all that linoleum taken up, and the floorboards polished. And everything will be painted, of course.’

  Bethan sniffed. ‘It stinks,’ he offered.

  ‘Well, that’s because there were squatters living here for a while. But the smell will go.’ Mum turned to Ray. ‘I’ve aligned the bagua,’ she said, ‘and the Gate of Chi is in six, so that’s okay. In fact the whole alignment’s pretty good.’

  Ray nodded. I should explain that while Mum may work in a bank part time, she’s also an artist’s model, and does some tarot reading on the side. What I mean is, she’s a bit of a hippy. And she believes in all that Feng Shui stuff, where your house has to be arranged properly, for good luck.

  I’m not sure if I believe in it or not.

  ‘The kitchen’s a disaster,’ she said, leading us down the hall. ‘We can live with the bathroom, but not the kitchen. I think I’ll have the whole lot ripped out and replaced.’ She said that the stove would have to be moved, because it was right next to the refrigerator – a placement that would cause ‘danger and conflict’. Unless, perhaps, she put a plant between the fridge and the stove, to allow a smoother flow of energy from water to wood to fire? But that still wouldn’t cure the bad placement, because the stove was sitting under the window. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I think we’d better start from scratch. After all, a kitchen is the symbolic source of wealth and wellbeing in any house. We can’t afford to get it wrong.’

  No comment from me. Bethan remarked that the kitchen smelled like the old man at the railway station, and wondered aloud if he could have been living here. Ray wanted to know where his studio would be.

  Ray is an artist, so he needs space to paint in. Mum met him when she was modelling for a life-drawing class, about five years ago. She likes his work because it’s not just a bunch of squiggles and splodges and abstract shapes. She says that abstract shapes create an environment in which people find it hard to finish things. Ray paints people and houses and fruit and chairs, but not trees. He spends forty hours a week drawing trees for the Department of Forestry, so he won’t paint them in his spare time.

  Before Ray there was Simon, and before Simon there was my dad. But Dad lives in Thailand, now. He phones us about once a month.

  ‘Are the bedrooms upstairs?’ I asked, because the bedrooms were what really interested me. The main reason we’d decided to move in the first place was so that Bethan and I could have our own rooms. No eleven-year-old girl should be forced to share a bedroom with her eight-year-old brother.

  ‘Yes, the bedrooms are upstairs,’ Mum replied. ‘Yours is the one at the back, and Bethan’s is the little one next to the bathroom. You go up, if you like – I’ll just show Ray his studio.’

  Ray’s studio was a kind of shed in the back yard; Mum said that it had ‘a lot of potential’. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms and a bathroom, all sitting one behind the other. The big front bedroom was for Mum and Ray, because it was the nicest, with glass doors opening onto a balcony. The bedroom at the back wasn’t as nice, or as big, but it had a view of some trees out the window.

  I was standing there, wondering who had painted the whole room red (yuk!) and who had left a suspicious-looking pile of rags in one corner, when Bethan called out.

  ‘Allie! Come and look at this!’

  I’d better admit, right here and now, that Allie is short for Alethea. Alethea Gebhardt – that’s my name. Alethea means ‘truth’ in Greek, and Bethan means ‘life’ in Welsh.

  Like I said, Mum’s a bit of a hippy.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, when I reached Bethan’s room. It was little and dingy, and it was covered with writing. There was writing scrawled all over the walls, the ceiling and the windowsills; only the dirty, shaggy old carpet had been spared. It wasn’t the usual sort of graffiti you see around the place, either. It looked as if it had been written with a pen – not spray-painted – and it was neat and small and dense.

  So dense was it, in fact, that you couldn’t read most of it. Lines had been scribbled over other lines, layer upon layer of script. You could only vaguely tell that it was writing at all.

  From a distance, the walls appeared almost black.

  ‘Gee,’ I said.

  ‘Is yours like this?’ Bethan inquired.

  ‘Nope. Mine’s red.’

  ‘Red writing?’

  ‘Red paint.’

  ‘Why do I have to get the weird
one?’ Bethan complained.

  ‘It’s no big deal, Bethan. We’ll just paint over the writing.’

  ‘I still don’t think it’s fair.’

  When Mum saw the room, she said that the squatters who had lived in it must have been on drugs. Then she told Bethan not to worry, because the next time he walked into his room its walls would be white, its floor would be polished, and its energy would be very positive. Give her a month, she said, and we wouldn’t know the place.

  Well, she was wrong. Six weeks passed, and she was still fighting with tradesmen and poring over laminex catalogues. She was always going off to visit the new house, and bringing back things she found there. Once she brought back scraps of ancient newspaper from under the old linoleum. Once she brought back a dirty blue bottle. (She said it was an antique.) The best thing she brought back was a book, which had been shoved under one of the stair-treads for extra support. (The stairs also needed repairing.) It was a copy of Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson – a book of poetry – and it was mouldy and speckled and eaten up by rats (or perhaps cockroaches). But you could still read bits of it, including the inscription on the flyleaf. Someone had written, Eglantine Higgins, 1906, and underneath had scrawled, A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. – Milton.

  We kept it for a while, that book, but we don’t have it any more. We got rid of it because . . . Well, you’ll see why. You’ll see why when I tell you what happened after we finally moved in.

  Our possessions were transferred on a Tuesday. When Mum picked us up from school and brought us to the new house, all our furniture was neatly arranged, although most of the boxes still had to be unpacked. The walls downstairs were white and yellow; upstairs, they were all white. The floors gleamed. There was glass in every window. The kitchen looked great, with polished wooden cupboards and clay-coloured tiles on the floor. Mum had made new curtains and hung them in the bedrooms. Even our cat, Salema, seemed happy with the change.

  I went straight to my own room and lay for a while, glorying in the privacy. It was my room. Mine. No longer would I have to put up with Bethan’s speedway set and football posters. No longer would I have to protect my Derwent pencils and animal skulls from Bethan’s prying friends.

  Then I heard him complaining, and went to see what was wrong.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  His room had been transformed. It was all white, and seemed much bigger, despite the cardboard boxes piled everywhere. Of course, Bethan had already begun to strew his Lego and dinosaurs about. Soon the floor would be impassable.

  He’s always been a messy boy.

  ‘Look,’ he said again, and pointed.

  Down near the foot of his bed, along the top of the skirting board, I could see a line of script. Once there lived in a bleak clime a white-bearded king, it said. You could hardly make it out, but Bethan was most offended.

  ‘The painters missed a bit,’ I remarked patiently. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is that I don’t want it there!’

  ‘So tell Mum. She’ll paint over it. She’s got leftover paint, remember?’

  He stumped off to summon help, and Ray came up and dabbed a bit of white paint over the troublesome graffiti. We all thought that the problem had been solved. But the next morning, Bethan came down to breakfast grumbling about another missed bit, near the ceiling, above the window. He was quite worked up about it. When I stuck my head into his bedroom, however, I could barely see the writing from the door; it was the faintest grey smudge, impossible to read. I asked him why it bothered him so much.

  ‘Because it does,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t even read it.’

  ‘I still don’t want it there.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because this is my bedroom.’

  My brother is very stubborn. He has red hair and freckles, like my mum, but he’s stubborn like my grandmother. When he decides that he doesn’t like something, there’s no way you’ll change his mind – not ever. So there’s no use trying to convince him that books can be more fun than football magazines, or that a little bit of writing won’t spoil a whole bedroom.

  He’d decided that he didn’t want the ravings of some loony squatter soiling his beautiful white walls. (And you can understand his point of view, I suppose.) So poor old Ray had to climb up a ladder, that evening, and paint over the words His realm was wide enough, indeed. Bethan went to bed much happier, as a result.

  But the next morning he discovered, not one, but two more missed spots. Many rugged mountains crossed the kingdom had been written under the windowsill. A barren soil and chilly sky made it seem poor was tucked behind the wardrobe. With a sigh, Ray had to haul out the white paint again.

  It was Thursday before Mum finally began to get suspicious.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, peering at the line that was written directly over Bethan’s bed. (Among these were great mines of salt and iron ore.) ‘Wait just a minute. Are you trying to tell me that the painters missed this? I don’t think so, Bethan.’

  Bethan’s freckles stood out sharply against his white face, the way they always do when he’s frightened or angry.

  ‘Well, I didn’t do it,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Look at me, Bethan.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ I interjected, and Ray sidled out of the room. He doesn’t like family arguments.

  ‘I’ll just get the paint,’ he called, clumping down the stairs.

  ‘This is very silly and childish behaviour,’ Mum informed Bethan. ‘And if you do it again, there’ll be no TV for a month.’

  ‘But I didn’t do it!’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that, thank you.’

  ‘You never believe me! I didn’t do it! Why should I?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Bethan. Probably for the same reason that you wrapped the cat in toilet paper, and put all those silly things in the microwave oven.’

  ‘That isn’t fair!’

  ‘Bethan,’ said Mum, ‘I’m not going to argue with you. One more time, and you won’t be watching TV for a month.’

  Well, I thought – that should do the trick. Bethan’s a real TV addict, you see. And Mum hates television, so she’s always happy to deprive us of it. I don’t think she’d have it in the house, if it wasn’t for Ray. Ray watches the news every night, religiously – he can’t do without his news and current affairs.

  Anyway, I wasn’t surprised when Bethan stopped complaining about missed spots. Two days passed, and he didn’t utter another word on the subject. I noticed that he was looking subdued, and distracted, and that he wasn’t making his usual blunt remarks and dumb jokes. (Maybe Mum would have noticed too, if she hadn’t been so busy unpacking boxes.) In the end, I decided that some footballer must have been disqualified, or that Bethan had done something stupid at school. I mean, he was still eating like a vacuum cleaner and kicking his ball around the backyard. I didn’t think that anything could be really wrong.

  Not until he came to me one morning, with tears in his eyes, and begged me to look at his room.

  CHAPTER # two

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I have to show you,’ he replied.

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  Now, ‘please’ isn’t a word that my brother uses very often, so I got a bit concerned. I looked at him closely, saw that he was seriously rattled, and stood up. I had been doing my homework, which was due on Monday, but some things are more important than homework.

  I followed him into his room.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘And there, and there. See?’

  I saw. There were more scribbled black lines scattered around his white walls – about six of them. Some were too high up to read. One was on the back of his door: it said, and his coasts were populous with fishermen. Another was scrawled near the night-light.


  I shook my head, slowly. ‘Mum’s going to kill you,’ I said.

  ‘But I didn’t do it!’ Bethan wailed. His voice cracked and began to wobble all over the place. ‘I didn’t, honestly, why doesn’t anyone believe me? Al, I don’t know how they got here!’

  Frowning, I peered at him. He didn’t sound like himself at all. Usually, when he starts protesting, his tone is very defensive. This time he just gave the impression of being upset. Upset and scared.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I pressed him.

  ‘Yes! I didn’t! It was someone else!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It didn’t seem likely. But when I looked at the writing again, it occurred to me that Bethan wouldn’t have had the ability – let alone the patience – to write in such a precise, elegant way. Bethan’s writing is big and round, with some letters squashed up and others stretched out. Not only that, but he needs lines under his letters if he wants them to stay straight and even.

  The writing on the wall was straight and even without the help of lines.

  ‘Do you think . . . I mean . . . it couldn’t be Ray, could it?’ I murmured, and we looked at each other.

  ‘Ray?’ said Bethan, in bewilderment.

  ‘It can’t be Mum. You saw how cross she was.’

  ‘It can’t be Ray. Why would Ray do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Suddenly Bethan’s face went red.

  ‘It better not be you!’ he cried. ‘If it’s you, I’m going to kill you!’

  ‘It’s not me.’

  ‘Then who is it?’

  I stepped back, and gazed around the room.

  ‘Let’s ask Mum,’ I said.

  So we went downstairs. It was Mum’s turn to cook dinner, and she was making her risotto (which isn’t one of my favourites), humming as she moved around her shiny, brand-new kitchen.

  It seemed a pity to spoil her mood, but we didn’t have any choice.

  ‘Mum,’ I said.

  She looked up from the chopping board, and smiled. ‘Yes, my darling?’

  ‘Mum, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. And you mustn’t blame Bethan, because it’s not his fault. Honestly. He didn’t do it.’