At the cottage, Clara unpacked and put away her clothes and set a framed family photo her mum had encouraged her to bring, next to her bed. Clara remembered that it’d been taken the last time the family were on holiday together and had gone for a picnic with their cousins.
After she was satisfied that everything was in order, she went downstairs and found her aunt sitting in the garden enjoying a glass of homemade lemonade. Clara flopped down onto the other garden chair and helped herself to a glass. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the woods and thinking; Clara about how she could raise the topic of advanced shape-shifting with her aunt, and Selina about how she could prevent her niece from raising that exact subject. After a while, Selina suggested that they go to the shop in the village to stock up the kitchen.
Walking back through the village sometime later, laden with the groceries, they were stopped by a lady known to Selina who had just come out of the village hall.
“Selina, my dear. You’re back. And I see you have your niece with you. How are you Clara?” The lady asked.
“I’m very well, thank you,” replied Clara politely.
“Clara, you remember Mrs Jones. You met her when you visited me last. How’re the preparations for the show coming along Mrs Jones?” Selina asked.
“Why don’t you come in and see?” Mrs Jones replied, ushering them towards the hall.
“We can stop by for a minute or two,” replied Selina. “But we can’t stay long – we need to get all this home.”
Clara was curious about the village hall and was eager to go inside and see it. As Selina and Mrs Jones talked about the preparations for the annual flower show, Clara wandered about the hall, looking at the notice boards and other displays. It was apparent that some of the original walls had been knocked down to create the large hall, with a stage at one end for shows. As Clara wandered down to the end of the hall, she noticed a door going to other rooms at the back, which turned out to be an office and some dressing rooms. There were also stairs leading down to a basement level and upwards to a first floor. Unfortunately, Clara was unable to explore further, as her aunt was calling her. They went back to the cottage and put the shopping away, all the while with Clara thinking about how she could find an opportunity to spend some proper time investigating the hall.
However, opportunities for exploring came sooner than Clara thought. While they were in between full moons, Aunt Selina wanted to avoid the subject of advanced shape-shifting, so she encouraged Clara to get out and about and explore the area on her own.
She wasn’t able to find an excuse to get into the village hall, which was locked most of the time, however, she explored the village thoroughly and became very familiar with it. They even went up to the estate house for a look around when it was open to the public.
A couple of weeks into her stay, Clara finally had an opportunity to fully explore the hall. Aunt Selina had been drafted in to help with the decorations for the flower show and had invited Clara to come along. After an hour of supplying paint and brushes and paper to various helpers in the hall, Clara slipped away through the door at the back and went into each of the rooms she found there.
She explored the rooms and noted that most of the original woodwork appeared to still be there. The floors, however, had been covered with linoleum and the walls had been painted over. If I was Great Aunt Clara where would I hide a secret diary? It would need to be somewhere I could access fairly easily, like my bedroom, or maybe a playroom or attic. And to keep it a secret, you’d need to find somewhere safe like a loose floorboard. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be able to investigate the walls or floors without ripping up the linoleum or destroying the paintwork. She continued to inspect the rooms anyway in the hopes of finding some kind of clue.
Having not found anything of interest on the ground floor, Clara climbed the stairway to the first floor. At the top of the stairs was a long corridor that ran down the length of the building ending at a window, which overlooked the village square. There were rooms on both sides of the corridor. Clara wandered along, trying the door handles along the way. Some of them were locked. Peeking into the ones that weren’t, Clara saw that they were principally small offices and classrooms.
Clara briefly stepped into each unlocked room. The floors in these rooms weren’t covered and the wood panelling on the walls was varnished rather than painted. While this was a bit more promising than the ground floor, Clara still had no idea what each room might’ve been used for when her Great Aunt Clara was alive.
When she reached the last room in the corridor, Clara hit pay dirt. It was currently being used as a library. Perusing the shelves, Clara saw that it mostly held technical journals, however, hung on one wall, was a large framed architectural picture of the village hall showing its original usage. In addition to this, there was a leaflet describing the family that had lived there and giving information about what their daily lives would’ve been like.
Clara peered closely at the picture. It appeared that the ground floor rooms of the house had been used for business purposes, including offices and storerooms. The first floor had been the living quarters including a dining room, living room, school room/playroom and several bedrooms. The next floor up was described as the attic rooms and was mostly storage space or servants’ quarters.
Clara had been right; her Great Aunt Clara would’ve spent the majority of her time on the first floor of the hall. The question was, which of the bedrooms would’ve belonged to her ancestor?
Clara picked up the leaflet to see if it could help. The leaflet started by describing when the hall had been built, and what its purpose was. It went on to describe about the Lord and Lady of the village in the estate house, their industry and how it was managed by one of Clara’s ancestors. It then went on to describe the family having the father who was the manager of the estate, his wife, their three children (two sons and a daughter) and numerous cooks, cleaners, gardeners, and other staff.
Clara was beginning to think that the leaflet would be useless, when she came upon a paragraph describing how the children were taught by a tutor in the school room, which was adjacent to the boy’s bedroom and opposite the daughter’s bedroom. Bingo! thought Clara, looking back at the wall plan. The room she was in was marked down as being the living room, which looked out onto the village square. The room behind it was marked down as the dining room. The room behind that was noted as the school/playroom, which meant that the last room on this side of the corridor was the boy’s bedroom. This could only mean that Clara’s great-great-great-great-aunt’s bedroom was the first room on the right, at the top of the stairs. That’s handy, Clara thought. She would’ve had easy access to the stairway day or night. That was how she managed to sneak out when she needed to.
Clara left the library and made her way back to the stairs. Reaching the room in question, she tried to remember if this was one of the ones that had been unlocked. “Only one way to find out,” she muttered under her breath and reached out to open it.
Chapter Seventeen
A moment later, Clara let out a relieved sigh as the door swung inwards, allowing her access to the room.
With a building excitement, Clara stepped inside and softly closed the door behind her. She’d already had a quick look in this room on her way past earlier but thought she might have more luck this time knowing that this was the right room.
First of all, she slowly ran her fingers along the dado rail that ran along the walls. She couldn’t detect any breaks in the rail itself, either above or below it. Next, she studied the floorboards. She walked along each one to test them to see if one was loose. While many of them creaked when she walked over them, when she knelt down to study them more closely, none appeared loose. Of course, she mused, that could have something to do with a couple of hundred years of re-varnishing, or it’s possible that loose floorboards could’ve been mended at some point. Clara sighed and stood up, stretching out her back. She’d been going around the ro
om, inch by inch, for what felt like an age, but hadn’t discovered anything useful.
She tried one more lap, to see if she could see anything she might’ve missed, when her eyes came to a rest on what appeared to be a connecting door. She didn’t have any hope that it would mean anything, but, she thought, what the heck, and moved across the room to try the door. When she opened it, she was surprised to find that it was a cupboard. It was mostly empty, there were just a few planks of wood and screws that could’ve been there since the last restoration. Clara stepped into the dark, dusty space and examined each of the walls and the planks on the floor as thoroughly as she’d done in the main room. She’d almost given up on the fruitless search, when her fingers felt something suspicious. On the bottom left hand side of the cupboard, in the darkest corner, there appeared to be a tiny hole. Clara lay down on her stomach to get a closer look. She could definitely see a small hole shaped like a keyhole. But she couldn’t see what would happen if it was unlocked. She couldn’t see or feel the edge of a door or a hinge that would suggest a door was there.
Clara knocked on the walls around the keyhole. The deep timber sound of knuckles on wood did not change, no matter where she knocked. There didn’t appear to be a hollow space anywhere there at all. Clara frowned. How curious, she thought. A keyhole that doesn’t appear to open anything. In which case why was it there? This discovery felt significant to Clara, but she couldn’t think what to do about it.
After a few moments of puzzling over the hole, Clara resignedly backed out of the cupboard. When she got up, she was covered in thick, pale dust. Clara tutted and brushed it off her clothes as best she could, coughing at the dust cloud that resulted. Then she left the room and went back downstairs to the main hall, still puzzling over her find.
“There you are, Clara,” said Aunt Selina. “We wondered where you’d disappeared to. Been exploring I see.”
Clara blushed furiously, wondering how her aunt had known what she’d been up to. Selina leant forward and pulled a dust mote out of Clara’s hair, giving her a wink in the process. “All this decorating has given me a thirst,” said Selina. “Do you want to go to the cafe for a drink?”
Clara nodded her head enthusiastically. They made their way out of the hall and across the square to the cafe. Clara had a strawberry milkshake and her aunt had some lemonade.
“So did you find anything?” Aunt Selina asked. Clara choked on a mouthful of milkshake, her aunt patting her gently on the back until Clara could catch her breath. Clara wondered how much she should tell Selina, given her aunt’s reticence on the subject of the diaries.
“Yes and no,” replied Clara slowly, and then told her aunt about what she’d found.
“That’s interesting,” said Selina when Clara told her about the keyhole in the cupboard. “I don’t think anybody has noticed that before.”
“It may not mean anything,” shrugged Clara. “And even if it does, we don’t have the key to open it anyway.”
“Hmm,” said her Aunt, thinking that this may be the perfect project to take Clara’s mind off advanced shape-shifting. “If there is a key, I may well know where it is.” Clara eyes widened.
“Where?” she asked, breathlessly.
“Well, when the hall was donated to the village, everything that belonged to our family was moved out to the cottage I inherited. In addition, Aunt Phoebe collected a lot of family heirlooms over the years. I don’t remember coming across a key in any of the stuff in the attic, but then I’ve never specifically looked for one before.” Aunt Selina watched as excitement spread across Clara’s features.
They finished their drinks quickly and then went straight back to the cottage. Selina took Clara up to the top of the house and into the attic. Once inside, Clara’s heart sank. The attic stretched the full length and width of the house and was full of boxes, some of which were stacked three high. Where on earth were they going to start?
“Don’t look so glum – it’s not as bad as it seems,” said Aunt Selina. “The boxes are sorted chronologically. The boxes furthest back are the oldest. All we need to do is move some of the more recent boxes out of the way so that we can access the ones that are further back.”
They then spent the rest of the afternoon removing some boxes from the attic and re-stacking others to make a path to the back. By dinner time they were exhausted, sweaty and dirty.
“I think we need to have a quick shower before dinner, what do you think?” said Aunt Selina. Much as she hated to give up on the search when they appeared to be so close, Clara was weary enough to agree with her aunt.
“I’ll go first,” said Selina. “And then I’ll put the dinner on while you’re cleaning up.”
“Okay,” said Clara as they trudged back down the stairs.
Lying in bed later that night, Clara thought about the task ahead. Despite previous reservations, her aunt appeared to be being very helpful in trying to find the key and that made Clara a little suspicious. She wondered whether Selina genuinely believed that the key could be found in the attic, or whether she was humouring Clara. Clara pursed her lips; she fantasised about finding the key and it leading them to finding the diaries. How would her aunt feel then? She wondered smugly. Then she sighed. She needed to be realistic. Even if by some miracle they did find a key in one of the many boxes in the attic there was only a small chance it would fit the keyhole in the cupboard. She shouldn’t get her hopes up too high. Clara tossed and turned for some time with these thoughts running through her head before giving up on sleep and deciding to get a glass of milk from the kitchen.
She was sitting at the table drinking the milk when her aunt came in.
“I’m so sorry,” said Clara. “Did I wake you?”
“I’m a light sleeper,” Selina said, smiling. She poured a glass of milk for herself and joined Clara at the table.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked Clara.
Clara shook her head.
“Did you try the relaxation technique I showed you?” Selina queried.
Clara shook her head again. Then she looked intently at her aunt.
“Aunt Selina, do you think we’ll find the key?” she asked.
Selina looked down into her glass, as if searching for an answer in her milk.
“It’s possible,” she prevaricated. “Can’t hurt to look, can it?” And she smiled lightly at Clara.
Clara could tell by Selina’s expression, that she didn’t believe the key would be found. Well, there’s my answer, she thought wryly. Selina thought this was a wild goose chase and was using it to distract Clara. We’ll see about that, Clara thought, determinedly.
Selina took her empty glass to the sink for rinsing.
“Don’t stay up too long,” she said to Clara, patting her gently on the shoulder on her way past. Clara stayed at the kitchen table for a few more minutes after her aunt had gone, before rinsing her glass and putting it away.
Back in bed she initiated her meditation technique, clearing her mind of all thought and after a while, she drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.
***
The next morning Clara woke feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the attic with gusto. She wolfed down her breakfast and raced up the stairs. By the time Selina joined her, she had reached the last two ranks of boxes at the back of the attic.
“Okay,” said Selina. “The oldest boxes will be made of wood rather than cardboard or plastic. Watch out for loose nails, I don’t want you getting a festering wound up here. I promised your parents I would take care of you.”
Clara considered which box to open first. Deciding on the nearest wooden box, she put her fingers under the lid and prised it off. In it she found some costume jewellery, clothes and shoes. She pulled the clothes out and checked the pockets, pulled out the shoes and tipped them up to see if anything would fall out of them. After pulling all of the contents out of the box she ran her fingers around the inside to make sure there was nothing left. All she gained for her effort was a painful spli
nter.
Several boxes later, she still hadn’t found anything to show for her efforts. Selina was having a similar experience beside her. They decided to take a break. While slurping some juice, they assessed the situation. They’d worked through eight boxes between them so far. There appeared to be at least another eight still to be searched. Refreshed by the lemonade, they renewed their efforts with enthusiasm. Three boxes later, Clara came upon a box full of children’s toys and felt a sense of urgency as she took each toy out and examined it. They were all simple toys - building blocks and wooden tops, and there were also some porcelain dolls, which were seriously lacking for hair, their clothes motheaten.
Nearing the bottom of the box Clara, reached in and pulled out a jewellery box. It was made of a beautiful, dark red wood that was so shiny she could see her reflection in it. She marvelled at the smoothness and intricate detail of the wood and, when she pulled open the lid, she found the interior lined in bright red velvet. The box seemed brand new. Unfortunately, it was completely empty. Instead of putting the jewellery box back in the crate with the rest of the toys, though, Clara carefully put it to one side.
A couple of hours later, all of the wooden boxes had been searched and no key had been found. It was late afternoon; they’d both worked on through lunch because they only had a few boxes to go. They sat back after the last box had been cleared, taking a few minutes to review all their hard work. They were both tired, dirty and empty, physically and mentally.
“Come on, let’s get cleaned up and have something to eat,” said Selina. “It’ll make us feel better.”
She hauled a desolate Clara up by the arm and pulled her to the top of the stairs.
“Hang on a sec,” Clara said and went back into the attic. Selina watched her bend down and pick something up. As Clara came back Selina saw that it was the jewellery box.
“May I take this downstairs to my room?” Clara asked.
Under the Light of a Full Moon Page 12
