Eglantine

by Catherine Jinks

  ‘Maybe it only stops when the room’s totally black,’ he moaned. ‘Maybe the ghost just hates white paint.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ I conceded. ‘I wonder what would happen if Ray painted the room black?’

  ‘But I don’t want a black room!’ Bethan said crossly. ‘Black walls are for wankers!’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I replied. I had to agree, however, that a black room would be pretty depressing. Even I didn’t like the idea of sleeping in a black room. And I’m the sort of person who fills up her bedroom with animal skulls, a three-dimensional model of the inside of the human ear (bought at a garage sale) and portraits of dead kings (King Henry VII of England is my favourite).

  ‘This is so annoying,’ my brother continued. ‘I hate this.’

  ‘Are you still having those dreams?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I don’t see what you’re complaining about.’

  ‘I’m complaining because I don’t have a room of my own!’

  ‘Well,’ I said witheringly, ‘neither do I. And you don’t hear me complaining.’

  After that, we trudged down to breakfast and went to school. Actually, I did sympathise with Bethan. I even let him have the last pancake that morning. But when I got to school I began to regret my generosity, because by the time recess rolled around, it had become glaringly obvious that Bethan had been shooting his mouth off about having a ghost in the house.

  First Malcolm Morling approached me and made stupid ‘ooing’ sounds as he fluttered his hands. Then, a little later, Amy Driscoll pranced up with her friend Zoe, and giggled, and nudged Zoe, and finally asked if it was true – was my house really haunted? When I told her ‘No’, she and Zoe exchanged glances, before exploding into another gust of giggles and scampering away.

  By the time Jesse Gerangelos had called me a ‘loony-tune’, I was aware that rumours had been spreading. And I was very cross with Bethan. (It’s no good getting cross with kids like Malcolm or Zoe; your best defence is to ignore them.) Though I had never actually asked Bethan to keep quiet about Eglantine, I had sort of assumed that she was a family secret. Why on earth would you make yourself a target for kids like Malcolm Morling? Most people don’t believe in ghosts, you see, and laugh at people who do. Not only do they laugh – they make stupid ghost noises, and drape their jumpers over their heads, and generally make pests of themselves. A lot of the dumber kids at school already thought that I was odd, because I happen to like reading history books, and buying ‘brainteaser’ magazines, and watching ants in the playground. (You’d think I was eating the ants, the way they carry on.) The last thing I needed was yet another reason for them to laugh at me.

  I resolved to have a sharp word with my brother when we got home that afternoon.

  At lunchtime I took refuge in the library, where I logged on to the website for the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. I had to poke around a bit, but at last I found a link that told me exactly what I wanted to know. First of all, I typed out Eglantine’s full name. Then I chose a ten-year period for a search of the Registry Index. The program can only search ten years at a time, you see, and I chose the years 1906 to 1916 – because I knew that Eglantine had been alive in 1906.

  Within seconds, I was given the information that Eglantine Higgins, born in 1890, had died in 1907. I was disappointed that she had died in some totally unfamiliar place. But when I consulted Mrs Procter, the place turned out to be not a town or a suburb but a shire – our shire. So that was all right.

  Eglantine Higgins had died in our shire, in 1907, at the age of seventeen.

  Unfortunately, the website couldn’t tell me how she had died. For that, it was clear, I would have to order a ‘Family History Certificate’. Family History Certificates were copies of old death certificates, and they cost $20 each if you had a registration number. I did have a registration number (it had been given to me along with information about Eglantine’s death), but I didn’t have a credit card. To order a certificate over the net, you had to enter your credit card details.

  That night, over dinner, I tackled Mum and Ray about our need for a Family History Certificate.

  ‘It will tell us how Eglantine died,’ I informed them. ‘There was a sample certificate on the website, and it told you everything. Cause of death. Date and place of death. Where and when buried.’

  ‘But why do we need to know these things?’ Mum asked fretfully. (She’d had a bad day at work.)

  ‘Because it’ll help us to understand why the ghost is here! What if she was murdered in this house? What if her body was buried out in the backyard somewhere, and never found?’

  ‘Would there be a death certificate if her body was never found?’ asked Ray.

  ‘I don’t know. And we’ll never know if we don’t get a certificate.’

  ‘Twenty dollars,’ Mum sighed. ‘That’s a lot of money, Al.’

  ‘I’ll pay it,’ Ray declared. He looked around the table. ‘I’d be interested to see what it says. I’ll log on tomorrow, and order one myself. What’s the name of the website, Allie?’

  I gave it to him. (It was www.bdm.nsw.gov.au.) Then I thanked him, and finished my ice-cream, and went upstairs to look at the latest instalment of Eglantine’s fairytale. I’ve already said that she had been very busy, the previous night. It took me an hour and a half to underline and copy out all the new lines of text. But putting it together was easier, this time, because most of the second half seemed to be a description of Princess Emilie. First, there was a bit about an orphaned fisherman’s son who had joined the navy of the white-bearded king. His name was Osric and, after fighting well in a couple of great battles, he had been made an officer and a count. Of course, he soon fell in love with Princess Emilie. It was love at first sight, because Princess Emilie was so beautiful. Her eyes were blue, her eyebrows black, her teeth small and pure. Her hair was brown and abundant, her mouth full-lipped and rosy. Even her upper lip was carefully described as finely chiselled, with a thousand haughty contractions lurking in its ordinary quiet curve (whatever that was supposed to mean!). There was stuff about the strength of her jaw, the oval of her lower face, and the severely intellectual character of her classic forehead. It went on and on. After a while, the words got so long and complicated that I had to go to Mum for help. We spent three quarters of an hour putting together a sentence that had a hundred words in it!

  In case you’re interested, the sentence was: When other moods possessed her, when the sultry and feverous heats of summer and the breath of too-rich flowers were upon her, when her blood was stirred by the bounding of her mettled horse, when old tales of adventurous love were ringing in her ears, and moonlight and heart-reaching songs were around her, then her breast heaved high and sank low with pulses of pleasure yet slumbering but ready to awake; her eyes swam with lustrous consciousness, and hung upon all beautiful sights with long gazes of langour so subtle that any lightest touch might quicken it to passionate ardour.

  I hope that makes sense to you, because it doesn’t to me.

  There was even more stuff like this on the walls the next morning, though of course I didn’t read it until I got home from school. Mum said it was ‘typically Victorian’. Michelle, when I showed her the text, said that it reminded her of poetry. She said that she had once read a poem that sounded a bit like it, and that she would ask her mother what the name of the poem was.

  Michelle is my best friend. She has a French grandmother, so she isn’t embarrassed about reading poetry. In fact she isn’t embarrassed about anything much: she’s elegant, and confident, and she gets high marks in geometry and maths. On Wednesday, she heard from Amy Driscoll that I was living in a haunted house. When she asked me about it, and I growled at her, she seemed surprised. ‘Why are you so prickly?’ she wanted to know. ‘I was only interested.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But everyone’s been joking about me.’

  ‘Have they? I haven’t heard them.’

  ‘Malcolm Morling thinks
I’m crazy.’

  ‘That’s because he’s crazy himself.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Honestly.’

  But Michelle dragged it out of me – I don’t know how. She can be very persuasive. I told her about the writing, and about Sylvia Klineberg, and about Eglantine Higgins. I told her about the book from under the stairs, and Eglantine’s fairytale. By the time I had finished, Michelle was more excited than I’d ever seen her.

  ‘You must show it to me,’ she begged. ‘This afternoon!’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Please, Allie!’

  In the end, I agreed. Michelle doesn’t live far from my house, so it was easy to arrange. She walked home with me from the bus stop, and we went straight upstairs to Bethan’s bedroom. Here there was something new – a dangling set of silvery windchimes. It hung from the light fitting.

  ‘Mum must have put it there,’ I remarked, as we gazed up at the tinkling arrangement of miniature pipes. ‘She thinks that windchimes might help.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something about dispersing bad energy.’

  ‘They’re not going to work very well if you keep the door and window shut.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t have to make a noise. Maybe they just have to be there.’ I mentioned my idea about an exorcist. ‘An exorcist,’ I said, ‘would be better than windchimes. Exorcists drive out evil spirits. I read it in a book.’

  But Michelle looked grave.

  ‘What makes you think this spirit is evil?’ she inquired.

  ‘Well, it’s keeping Bethan out of his bedroom, isn’t it? I call that evil.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Michelle, shaking her head. ‘Exorcists – I’ve heard about exorcists. A film was made about them. It’s my cousin’s favourite film, and the ghost in this house doesn’t sound like the evil spirit in that film.’

  ‘Why? What happened in the film?’

  ‘My cousin told me.’ Michelle’s voice became solemn. ‘It was about a demon, not a ghost, and it killed people. It threw them out windows, and twisted their heads around and vomited green slime, and cracked ceilings, and pushed over furniture, and slammed doors, and made people speak in strange, spooky voices. And two priests died trying to exorcise it.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. That made me think. I looked around the pale, quiet, sunny room. ‘Perhaps we don’t really need an exorcist.’

  Michelle agreed. Then she had to go home, so I said goodbye, and started to copy down the new lines of text. There were ninety-four of them. When I pieced them together, I discovered that Count Osric had declared his love to Princess Emilie. In response, Princess Emilie blushed and trembled, and he pressed his lips to her white hand before they were interrupted.

  From that time on, whenever his ship came into port, she would send a page to look for Count Osric. Once, she even disguised herself as a page, and saw Osric with her own eyes, from a distance. But suddenly the white-bearded king decided that his daughter should be married to the son of another great king, whose realm adjoined his own beyond the mountains, and who had been evermore a rival. The other great king was sent a message, which said, Make with me now this treaty of alliance, and send hither thy son. By my faith, I will give him my daughter to wife.

  I was beginning to have a bad feeling about the end of this fairytale.

  ‘What happened to Romeo and Juliet?’ I asked Mum that night. ‘They killed themelves, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because their families were enemies, and they loved each other.’

  ‘Was it based on a true story?’

  ‘No,’ Mum said, and hesitated. ‘At least,’ she added doubtfully, ‘I don’t think so. It was a play. By William Shakespeare.’

  ‘I know that,’ I replied, and wondered if Eglantine might have killed herself. For love, like Juliet. Was that possible?

  Then Sylvia rang. She wanted to know if she could come around on Friday night, with another investigator, and stay over in Bethan’s bedroom. They wouldn’t be any trouble, she promised. We wouldn’t even know they were there.

  Mum agreed, of course. What else could she do? She was beginning to get desperate.

  CHAPTER # six

  The windchimes didn’t work.

  By Friday evening, there was so much writing on the wall that I had begun to lose track of the story. From what I could piece together, I learned that a young prince had been sent to marry Princess Emilie, and everyone in the kingdom was preparing for the nuptials (that means wedding, according to Mum). Emilie wept and prayed, but the king stormed till he foamed at the mouth, for though he loved his daughter, he was also truculent and high of mood. Then Osric arranged a meeting with Emilie. I’m not sure how, because that bit was written over another bit, and impossible to read. But there was a long conversation strewn across the walls which involved Osric and Emilie, and a lot of ‘thee’s and ‘thy’s. For example:

  “Emilie, I think you love me.”

  “And if I do, Osric – what then: is it strange? Have I not heard thy voice growing ever more musical for my hearing, than for other ears? Have I not felt thy questing glance, thy probing words, going deeper into my heart than any other words or glance have ever been? If I do love thee Osric, I cannot help it; – what then?”

  After this, everything was a tangled mess, lines written over lines. I was able to make out His eyes were full of hope and enterprise, My love is not an idle passion and There are retreats where we may hide deep enough away. There was something about a drooping head and yielding mien – something else about a consenting word forever undoing the ties that bind. But I couldn’t get all the words to join together.

  It was annoying, I can tell you. And even more annoying was Sylvia’s reaction, when she arrived with her fellow investigator on Friday night. But before I tell you about that, I should tell you about Friday afternoon. On Friday afternoon, I came home to discover that the copy of Mum’s title deeds had arrived. Mum told me the news as soon as I walked in the door, and handed me a long piece of paper with a coat of arms at the top and a lot of typed words sitting above a series of scribbled-on stamps.

  ‘Prescott-Marsh, of Burrough, Teens and Walgrove,’ I read aloud, ‘is now the proprietor of an Estate in Fee Simple, subject nonetheless to the reservations and conditions, if any, contained in the Grant hereinafter referred to . . .’

  ‘Not that bit,’ Mum interrupted. ‘Down there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘That stamp. Each stamp is a new owner. You see? This mortgage here was discharged to Ernest George Higgins in March 1894.’

  ‘Higgins!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘He was probably Eglantine’s father. And look – the next owner bought the place in 1907. The year she died.’

  I gasped.

  ‘Ernest Higgins moved out,’ Mum continued, ‘the very year she died.’

  ‘Because she died in his house!’ I declared.

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘But it makes sense, Mum. Why else would you move out of a perfectly good house? Because your daughter died in it, of course!’

  ‘Because someone strangled her in my bedroom,’ Bethan suddenly remarked. He had come in quietly, and was peeling a banana from the fruit bowl. ‘That’s probably what happened.’

  ‘Maybe her father strangled her!’ I added. ‘Maybe he had to sell the house because he went to gaol.’

  ‘Now, stop it,’ said Mum, with a frown. ‘You’re being silly.’

  ‘But, Mum, just think.’ I myself was thinking – thinking hard. ‘In the story, the white-bearded king wants his daughter to marry a man she’s not in love with. Maybe the same thing happened here. Maybe it was like that TV series, “Nicholas Nickleby”, where the father was bankrupt and wanted his daughter to marry a rich man, and she wouldn’t because she was in love with someone else, so in this case he strangled her -’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Mum snapped. ‘You’re b
eing revolting and melodramatic. I don’t want any more talk about stranglings in this house!’

  But of course there was more talk about stranglings that night, because the two PRISM investigators came. Sylvia turned up in a neat pair of track-pants, a white woollen jumper and some very old running shoes. With her she brought a young guy named Richard Boyer, who was thin and pale and very keen. He had bright blue eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, and a quick, breathless way of talking. He was some sort of computer expert.

  When I told him about Eglantine, and Bethan told him about the choking nightmares, he suggested that Eglantine might have died, not because she was strangled, but because she had asthma.

  ‘I get asthma,’ he said, looking at Bethan. ‘Did it feel as if someone had parked a truck on your chest?’

  ‘No,’ Bethan replied. ‘It was as if someone was stuffing something down my throat.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Richard. Then he began to talk about other examples of ghostly writing on walls, including one called the Borley Rectory hoax that I’d read about at the library. He seemed very excited. He couldn’t sit still but kept jumping up, again and again, and roaming around the kitchen before returning to his seat. The sight of Eglantine’s book was almost too much for him; his hands trembled as he opened it.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Fascinating. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Is this the same text that’s written on the bedroom walls?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘That book is poetry. The stuff upstairs – well, it isn’t poetry.’

  ‘Maybe we should destroy the book,’ Ray suddenly remarked. He had been standing quietly near the fridge. ‘Has anyone thought of that? Maybe the book contains some – I don’t know – some essence or anchor that’s keeping Eglantine in this house. Maybe we should burn the book.’ As everyone turned to stare at him, he gave an embarrassed little smile. ‘Well,’ he finished, ‘it’s just a suggestion.’