The Forgotten Sister

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘Have you thought about that?’ she asked.

  Johnny shook his head. ‘No. Oh, don’t get me wrong – Millie’s death hurts like hell on Earth, but…’ He stopped. ‘I don’t want to die too. It’s the opposite. In fact, I’d do anything to bring her back,’ Johnny said suddenly, fiercely, ‘anything I could. If only I’d realised in time—’ He stopped again, abruptly and Lizzie waited but he didn’t complete the sentence. Once again, he looked lost in his thoughts.

  ‘It might help to talk to someone,’ she said, after a moment. ‘I was very closed off after my mum died. I was shipped around various people for a few years and went to boarding school so I just sort of bottled things up. That’s when I met Dudley and actually, I have to give credit to him – he was a good friend to me, when I had so few people to talk to. Anyway,’ she took a breath, ‘when I finally started to talk about it with a professional, it was really helpful.’

  ‘I did see a counsellor after Mum died,’ Johnny said. ‘He was great but I just don’t… the time isn’t right yet.’

  ‘Well, you’re the one who can judge that best,’ Lizzie said.

  Johnny smiled at her, vivid and warm. ‘You’re quite something, Lizzie Kingdom, you know that?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Lizzie almost blushed. ‘At the risk of ruining my credibility,’ she added, ‘have you told your family where you are now? Only I bumped into Arthur last night when he was looking for you and I got the impression he’d just like to know you’re safe.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Johnny nodded vigorously, ‘I’m sorry I took off like that yesterday. I needed time to think. I thought Arthur would be mad at me but actually—’ his grin was wicked, surprising her, ‘he didn’t seem to mind that much, which was all to do with meeting you again, I think.’

  Lizzie raised her brows. ‘Arthur’s hardly my greatest fan,’ she said.

  ‘Arthur,’ Johnny said, ‘doesn’t know what to think of you and that’s quite unusual, I can tell you. I love seeing Arthur confused. Normally he’s really together. Then you did your weird mind meld thing on him—’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Lizzie said involuntarily. ‘My what?’

  ‘Mind meld,’ Johnny said. ‘Like Spock in Star Trek,’ he added helpfully. ‘You touch someone and read their thoughts. It’s very cool.’

  ‘Did Arthur tell you about that?’ Lizzie asked.

  Johnny shook his head. ‘Arthur doesn’t talk much about the supernatural stuff. He’s not like Millie and me. We were both totally cool with it but Arthur always was the down to earth one.’ He took another shortcake biscuit. ‘No, Arthur didn’t say anything, but I saw the two of you together the other day. I was watching through the taxi window when he came back to speak to you. You touched his arm and he looked at you, and I could tell you were reading his thoughts.’ He looked at her. ‘Have you always been psychic?’

  Lizzie opened her mouth to deny that she was and then shut it again. ‘I’m not sure I am psychic really,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve never done that before – read people’s thoughts, I mean. Sometimes I read objects. It started with possessions that belonged to people I loved, people like my mum and my gran. Maybe I wanted to feel a sense of connection with them. I don’t know. But it kind of went on from there.’

  Johnny nodded. ‘I can understand why your family link might trigger that,’ he said, ‘but your gift is bigger than just psychometry. It must be if you can read Arthur’s mind as well. It’s really cool you have these gifts,’ he added. ‘You shouldn’t be afraid of them.’ He paused, wiping some stray chocolate from his chin. ‘Can you travel in time as well?’

  ‘What?’ Lizzie stared at him. ‘Now come on, that’s a whole different thing. I mean…’ She gulped. ‘No. Stop. That’s not possible.’

  Johnny shrugged, grinning. He didn’t seem remotely fazed. ‘Psychometry and telepathy are possible but time travel is impossible? OK.’

  Lizzie shook her head. ‘You sound a lot more comfortable with all this stuff than I am,’ she said. ‘But seriously, I don’t really like feeling different, so I tend to push it aside and try to ignore it. It’s a bit of a guilty secret. Or it was,’ she amended, ‘before Arthur and I had our moment. Now I guess it’s not secret anymore.’

  Johnny was smiling too. ‘Don’t worry about Arthur,’ he said. ‘He’s totally fascinated by you even if he’d like to deny it.’ He stretched. ‘Besides, there’s no need to be uncomfortable about supernatural stuff. It’s a bit weird but then so is dark matter or string theory or whatever.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Lizzie said, wondering what string theory was. ‘How did you get to be so wise so young?’ she added.

  ‘I must have been born that way.’ Johnny shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable. ‘Anyway, I’m weird too. Millie and I were psychic.’

  ‘You and Amelia had a psychic connection?’ Lizzie felt surprised then wondered why she would be. Perhaps it was because Amelia’s interest in the supernatural had always seemed fake. But then, she supposed she had rather unfairly dismissed Amelia as fake in every respect. She should try to be less judgemental, especially since she hated people judging her.

  ‘Yeah,’ Johnny said. ‘Millie and I had a gift. We could talk to each other in our heads. We’d always done it, right from as early as I can remember.’ He shifted in his seat, clasping his hands together around the mug of chocolate. ‘Mum was totally into paranormal stuff so it never seemed strange to me, just natural, you know?’

  Lizzie didn’t really know. Her experience had been very different, hiding her gift of psychometry from her father, from Kat, especially from Bill, who would probably have tried to turn her into a stage psychic if he had known about it. She had pushed it aside and kept it as a secret thing; she had been confused and almost ashamed of something that seemed so bizarre. She was already different; the child from the outrageously dysfunctional family. She didn’t want anything else marking her out.

  ‘It was just Millie and me, though,’ Johnny went on. ‘The other sibs couldn’t do it – Anna and Arthur, I mean. Millie and I were the only ones who could read each other’s minds. Anna was really cross that she wasn’t telepathic too.’ He was hunched forward now and the line of his shoulders was thin and tense. ‘I guess that was why Millie and I were the closest,’ he said, ‘although I love Arthur dearly. He’s the best.’ He said it quite unselfconsciously and Lizzie’s heart clenched.

  He loves you too, she thought, but she didn’t say.

  ‘Shall we go through into the other room,’ she said, ‘it’s more comfortable there.’

  Johnny got up and followed her through to the living room. Like most people he was drawn to the huge floor-to-ceiling windows like a moth to a flame. It was night outside now and the pinprick lights of London together made a tapestry of dazzling hues.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘This is an amazing place.’

  ‘It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?’ Lizzie smiled. ‘I could sit looking at the view for hours.’

  ‘This was once the site of a royal palace, you know,’ Johnny said. ‘It was called Baynard’s Castle. The foundations are right under this building. Henry VII rebuilt it and apparently it was very beautiful. Great view of the river too; the nobility grabbed all the best locations.’

  ‘That figures,’ Lizzie said. These days it was the rich who could afford prime real estate in London, celebrities, bankers, power-brokers, the aristocrats of their day. ‘I could show you a picture of it,’ Johnny said. ‘It’s amazing when you imagine what all the old palaces along the river must have looked like.’ He patted his pockets. ‘Damn, I must have dropped my phone in the car.’

  ‘Some other time, then,’ Lizzie said. ‘History isn’t really my thing but I’d be interested to see it.’ She sat down and after a moment Johnny did the same, taking the chair opposite her, leaning forward again, clearly unable to relax.

  ‘This wasn’t really how I thought it would be,’ he said, after a moment. He looked up at her, half rueful, half laughing. ‘You being so nice, I me
an. It makes it more difficult…’ His voice faded away. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I have something I need to ask you, and…’ He stopped again, frowning.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what prompted you to come to find me the other day?’ Lizzie said. ‘You said you needed my help then. We could start there.’

  Johnny’s face cleared. ‘Yes, OK. Thanks.’ He looked down at his clasped hands; he was gripping them together so tightly that the knuckles showed white. ‘This might sound odd,’ he said slowly, ‘but I wanted to ask you about what happened at Millie and Dudley’s wedding.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lizzie was taken aback. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting but it hadn’t been this. ‘Well, she said, ‘I remember that you were six years old and you didn’t like your page boy outfit.’

  ‘It was gross.’ Johnny shuddered. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant. I wondered—’ He looked at her. ‘I know it’s a bit weird to be asking now but what did you see in the crystal that day?’

  Lizzie wasn’t going to pretend that she couldn’t remember what he was talking about, especially now he knew she had the gift of psychometry. She thought of the crystal ball clasped in the hands of the angel and the plaintive notes of the harp she had thought she heard.

  ‘You asked me that at the time,’ she said slowly. ‘It was an odd question from such a young child.’

  ‘I knew even then that you had some sort of psychic gift,’ Johnny said. ‘I could sense it, maybe because I was psychic too.’

  Lizzie shifted, thinking back, feeling the uncomfortable memories crowd back in. ‘I told you the truth,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see anything in it at all. It was beautiful; I wanted to touch it, it called to me, but I resisted.’ She hesitated. ‘Like I say, I’m not always comfortable with my gift, and I was even less so in those days. And the crystal felt dangerous in some way, as though there was something malignant about it.’ She shivered suddenly, though the flat was warm.

  Johnny was watching her closely. ‘It broke in your hand,’ he said. ‘You must have touched it.’

  ‘You weren’t there when that happened,’ Lizzie said. ‘How did you know?’ The scar on her palm itched suddenly, fiercely.

  ‘I heard about it,’ Johnny said with a grimace. ‘The whole house heard. Amelia was screaming loudly that you’d deliberately broken her gazing ball.’

  ‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ Lizzie said. ‘OK, yes I did touch it, later, after Arthur had taken you away. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and just touched it lightly with my fingertips. I didn’t pick it up. And I did see something: I saw Amelia buying it in a shop in Glastonbury. That’s all.’ She stopped. She could feel Johnny’s gaze on her as though he was trying to gauge if she was telling the truth. She could also feel the insistent throb of the scar, like a heartbeat.

  Johnny was frowning. ‘I thought you must have seen something frightening and accidentally cracked the glass,’ he said.

  Lizzie shook her head. ‘I’d have been a lot more badly injured if I had,’ she said. ‘As it was there was only a little cut where some of the splinters caught me.’ She curled her fingers unconsciously over her palm. ‘I think I must have knocked the stone angel somehow, and the ball was dislodged,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask? It was a long time ago.’

  Johnny didn’t answer directly. ‘That carved angel was very old,’ he said. ‘Unlike the ball it was a genuine antique. It had been in the family for years and there have always been stories about, how it was unlucky, or cursed.’ He hesitated. ‘Millie didn’t believe them, obviously. She adored it. But I always wondered—’ he looked at Lizzie very directly, ‘whether it was the angel that had sent you a dark vision rather than the gazing ball.’

  Johnny’s words seemed to shiver in the air just like the cascade of notes Lizzie had heard when the crystal had called to her. Or she had thought it was the crystal. Perhaps Johnny was right. She shuddered convulsively. The memories repeated, the sense of falling, tumbling through space, plummeting into the void, terrified… She remembered the nightmare she had had only a few nights before and how she had wondered whether Amelia had also experienced that sense of terror when she had fallen to her death. She told herself fiercely that it had been a coincidence. Her gift of psychometry enabled her sometimes to look back to the past. She had never had the gift of foresight. Yet if Johnny was right and her psychic powers were greater than she had thought, perhaps she had underestimated what she could do.

  She pushed the idea away. She could not accept that she had foreseen Amelia’s death on her wedding day. The idea was unbearable. The horror and panic suddenly clogged her throat. She could not tell Johnny that he might be right, that she had experienced a falling sensation akin to what his sister would go through ten years later, a vision of death. What good would that do?

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘Like I said, all I saw when I touched the crystal was an image of Amelia buying it. It was after that I must have knocked the stone angel by accident and that was how the ball was dislodged and smashed.’

  The lie hung in the silence between them. It sounded loud. Lizzie could feel guilt colour flooding her face and jumped up. ‘Really, I should…’ She waved a vague hand around. ‘I’m supposed to be heading off tomorrow and I haven’t finished my packing.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Johnny accepted his dismissal like the well-mannered child he was. ‘I’d better be going too. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I… I guess I just needed to talk to someone.’

  ‘No problem,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’m here if you need me.’

  ‘If I might just use your bathroom before I go…’ Johnny sounded awkward. He blushed.

  ‘No problem,’ Lizzie said again.

  Whilst he was gone, she collected up the mugs and took them through to the kitchen. She was still thinking about the stone angel. Should she give it back to Johnny? It felt so awkward now, after all these years, especially with the family stories of how it bore a curse. It probably wasn’t the right time.

  When Johnny reappeared he had his jacket on and his rucksack slung over one shoulder.

  ‘Would you mind walking with me as far as the tube station?’ he asked diffidently. ‘I could show you the plaque marking the spot of Baynard’s Castle on the way.’

  ‘Sure,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’ll get my coat.’ The last thing she really wanted to do was to go looking at historic monuments in the dark but it would be good to see Johnny safely on his way home.

  The foyer was as empty as when Johnny had come in. Jason glanced up incuriously from the desk and then went back to his computer screen. The phone rang; he took the call quietly, discreetly. Lizzie wondered suddenly how she had come to live in such a hermetically sealed bubble. Sometimes it felt as though her life wasn’t real at all.

  Out on the street it was completely different. The air was warm and loud, alive with noise, thick with the scent of fat, spices and fumes. It was a shock, like a slap across the face. Lizzie dug her hands into the pockets of her coat and followed Johnny’s long, loping stride down the alley at the side of the block of flats. It was full of rubbish and the smell of decaying food, as unlike the polished frontage as it would be possible to find.

  ‘I guess you never see this stuff,’ Johnny said, catching her expression in the dim cast of the street lights. He grinned, ‘It’s taxis, limos, penthouses, and five-star hotels all the way.’

  ‘I don’t walk much,’ Lizzie admitted, ‘at least not in London.’ And these days, she thought, she seldom went anywhere else except for when she was filming. It was weird to realise all of a sudden how much her life, on the face of it so privileged and glittering, had shrunk to fit such small parameters.

  After the closeness of the streets above, the air off the river felt cold and dank, little eddies of mist blowing across the surface. The water shifted in a ceaseless pattern of light and dark, so much more real and immediate than the view from her flat high above. Lizzie felt odd, and small, to be out here instead of locked inside behind t
he glass walls of her flat or floating in the infinity pool.

  Johnny was leaning against the embankment wall, looking out across the wide stretch of the water. His shoulders were hunched, his face in shadow. ‘London’s extraordinary, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘so magical and so humdrum at the same time, thousands of years of history layered on top of each other.’ He turned to face her. ‘I promised I’d show you the plaque,’ he said. ‘It’s over here.’

  He caught her hand, pulling her over to the wall behind them, high, brick-built, rising to Lizzie’s apartment building above.

  ‘Look… Here…’ Johnny sounded breathless all of a sudden. He pushed back the brittle fronds of dying ivy to reveal a plaque, white letters on a dark background, bright in the pale orange light from the street lamps:

  NEAR THIS SITE STOOD BAYNARD’S CASTLE, 1428–1666.

  ‘I told you your penthouse was built on the site of a palace,’ Johnny said. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Wow,’ Lizzie said blankly. ‘That is amazing. I had no idea that was even here.’ She stretched out a hand towards the wall. The brick was clearly modern, neat courses with tidy mortar sandwiched between. Her fingers slid across the smooth, cool surface, feeling the dampness of the mist like grease on its face. The smell of the river was stronger now; fish and decay, brine and damp basements. It seemed to catch at her throat, smothering her. The wind off the water was growing stronger too, tugging at her hair, a cold rain chill on her face. She touched the blue plaque and suddenly everything changed. The wall vanished and she could see cobblestones beneath her feet and the remains of brick and chalk and mortar, a jumble of stone and rubble that would once have been a building. She had the dizzy sensation that she could see the high walls and tall towers of Baynard’s Castle rising above her like a cliff, a pennant blowing against a bright blue sky. She could hear the lap of the river at the water gate and the gulls calling. The stench of mud filled her nostrils. There was sun on her face now instead of rain and sufficient heat was blazing down that she felt the sweat spring to her forehead. Voices sounded close by and the clatter of hooves on cobbles.