The Girl in the Attic

by Wendy Reakes

  “You’ve made me very happy, dearest Celia.”

  She hugged me. “I have to go now.”

  “Wait, I have a gift for you. I wanted you to have it last night…”

  “No time now,” she called back as she followed the path through the forest of furniture. “I’ll come back later. I promise.” As she left, I heard her coughing before she closed the attic door behind her.

  I was left alone with my meal resting in my hands, feeling sad she was gone and that I wouldn’t see her again for many hours.

  Contrary to my optimistic attitude, existing within my secret abode, there had been times when I yearned to be free of my confines, to run outside, to stretch the bones and muscles in my legs over fields and plains and to feel the wind lashing my cheeks. My position was frustrating, since standing still was unnatural to me as darkness in daylight.

  For now, I forced the self-pity from my mind as I concentrated on being thankful for what I had. And one of those things was the food resting in the napkin in my hand.

  When Celia didn’t return that night, I surmised she’d been busy like the day before and that she was unable to sneak away from the festivities.

  When she didn’t come the next day or the next, I became desperate to know why.

  When Celia didn’t come to the attic for ten more days, I decided she must surely be dead.

  Now my heart was broken.

  Chapter 12

  Finding Celiawas an exploration of logic. I hadn’t seen her for ten days. She was lost to me, probably dead, but I had to know for sure. I had to. My distress had made me ill. I’d kept to my bed and I hadn’t eaten much at all. At times, I considered it to be a good thing; that maybe the baby growing inside me would starve and die. I thought that would solve one problem. I couldn’t imagine loving anyone as much as I loved my beautiful and brave friend Celia, so the thought of aborting the black-haired lout’s baby as it spilled out of me, didn’t faze me one bit. I just wanted Celia back, before I died too of a broken heart and extreme loneliness.

  On the tenth day, an angel spoke in my ear. That’s what it seemed to me, an angel telling me how I could find out if Celia were dead or alive. My mind was cast back to the day she’d conducted her ‘sound experiment’. She’d told me the room she shared with her mother was just below the second section of the attic. Four-feet of space existed between me and the ceilings in the servant quarters, so if I went to the secret bolt hole I’d prepared for use in an emergency, I might be able to make contact…if she was there! For all I knew, she could be buried in the cold ground now.

  Many a time I’d considered forcing my way out of the attic and shouting at the top of my lungs for her, but the consequences were too great. They would tell me she was dead and then I would be carted off to gaol where my baby would surely die or be taken away from me.

  I was in such a quandary, I was beside myself.

  I wasted no time after my guardian angel planted the idea onto my head to seek out Celia. But weak from my confinement and lack of food, when I placed my feet on the floor, I felt an acute pain shoot up my leg like a knife cutting into me. I’d turned my ankle weeks ago and I had never before felt such agonising pain, but with my goal first and foremost in my mind, I limped across the floor towards the second attic section.

  I quickly lifted the broken chair I’d placed over the cover of my hideaway and with haste I shoved it on top of another. I leaned down and opening the makeshift cover and lowered myself into the hole.

  What now? I thought as I tried to find an opening or something to enable me to spy into the room below the attic. I cast my mind back to the time I’d sneaked into the servant’s quarters when I’d first arrived. I remembered the ceiling as being a dirty white colour, so of course there must have been a layer of plaster beneath the boards…or something. Beyond my little space, cleared of mice droppings and all things that crawled, just big enough for me to curl up and hide, was an expanse of wooden beams running below the attic floor. Droppings and spider webs filled the expanse of the area where lengths of copper pipes criss-crossed themselves like a Chinese puzzle.

  I could feel a draught hit my face as I spotted the wall on the side of the building. Along it, covered in dust and webs, hundreds of years in the making, I could see four ornate metal grates which were vents of some sort. Just as I was about to make my way over by crawling on my knees, I heard a noise. I stopped and listened, hoping it was the sweet sound of Celia singing in her bedchamber below. But it wasn’t. The sound was coming from above. There was someone in my attic.

  I don’t know how long I stopped breathing. I felt like my whole world had turned upside down…literally. Now, it was I who skulked below, like the vermin roaming under the floorboards, with someone above me, thus reversing my top-of-the-house existence.

  Footsteps rattled my brain and the sound of voices made me want to lie flat out in a dead faint.

  “Can you remember where they put it?” a man’s voice said.

  I could feel my hands shake and my heart beat so fast, surely the pounding of it against the floor would alert them to my presence.

  A woman’s voice. “Somewhere around here, I’m sure of it,” she said. “My goodness. It’s only been sixteen years. It couldn’t have gotten far.”

  Footsteps. The sound of breathing. Surely mine. The people walked right above my head. I didn’t know whether I should crawl further under the boards or stay still. Would they find the space I’d crawled into? I hadn’t even covered up the opening. I didn’t think I needed to.

  “How do you even find anything up here, Porter?”

  The groundsman!

  “The lady don’t want it touched,” his voice replied. “All this furniture belonged to her father-in-law and she wants it kept this way. That’s what she told me.”

  “That’s silly. There’s no point on hanging onto old memories of the dead. Let them go, I say.”

  Footsteps.

  Furniture scraping the floor. Thuds and unfamiliar noises. I was going to die. I just knew it. Or worse…They would find me.

  “There it is. I’ll have to move some of this furniture.”

  The woman’s voice said. “Don’t bother. I can see it from here. The mane is chipped and there’s an ear missing.”

  They were referring to the old rocking horse. It was just a stone’s throw from my bolthole.

  “Don’t you want it then?”

  “No, I’ll tell them it’s destroyed beyond repair. They can get a new one for this baby.”

  “What’s this?” He had found something!

  Footsteps.

  “There’s a hole in the floor here.”

  Oh my God! I had surely held my breath for a whole ten minutes.

  Scraping, moving, shifting.

  Footsteps.

  A hollow thud.

  Then blackness.

  A muffled voice. “No wonder it’s draughty up here? That’ll fix it.”

  Moving, dragging, footsteps.

  A door banged.

  Quiet.

  I let out a sigh of relief. I was alone now and I could breathe again.

  I shifted my body along the dusty floor until I came to the opening where the cover had been placed upon it. Somehow my eyes had adjusted to the darkness down there and I could just make out some daylight -from somewhere- coming through the vents below the floorboards and the cracks in the boards above. Under the entrance to my bolthole I pushed up with my hands, but the cover didn’t move. I shifted along a bit and tried again, but once more the cover remained in place. I tried the strength in my back against the planks of wood I’d fashioned, by pushing against the floor with my knees and hands. The cover trembled, but that was all.

  Now I knew. The groundsman had put something above the door and once again I was trapped.

  My mind somersaulted all ways. I was willing myself not to panic, telling myself that somehow, I would find a way to escape. I turned my body, still prostrate on the floor, and looked towards the air
vents. I needed air, like never before. I dragged my body across the floor and up over a horizontal beam and when I finally reached the side wall and scraped off the spider webs and dust, I put my nose to the vent and inhaled a hearty lung full of fresh air.

  I couldn’t see through the slats. They were facing downwards on the external wall, but the air stimulated my mind enough to use logic to get me out of the situation I was in. I knew what I should do.

  I took one more intake of air and turned about. I was about to travel the expanse of the attic on my belly and the journey might take a long, long time.

  Chapter 13

  I had lost track of time. The air -or lack thereof- began to suffocate me and my body heat had warmed up the space around me, like I was a furnace in transit. My underarms were wet, and drips of sweat fell from behind my ears to run down my chest into the crease between my bosom. Along with the sweat, the dust and the filth stuck to me as if I were being tarred and feathered, like the conniving witch I was. As I spluttered my way across the attic floor, my mouth was so dry I was unable to make new saliva. It was eternally dark, and since I could only use my wits along with my sense of direction, progress was painfully slow and laborious. I lost all confidence in my ability to find my way in the dark, until finally, more by accident than any artful manoeuvre, I hit the wall on the other side. I was hoping to find some more air vents but there were none. Then I realised it wasn’t another external wall of the house but an interior one. I worked my body along the wall to the left, feeling my way against the cold bricks and the brittle rendering. The worst part was negotiating the pipes since I feared breaking one and doing untold damage to something I didn’t understand. I guessed they were water pipes, or gas even…I just didn’t know.

  When I thought my mind was going to spin out of control, I finally arrived at the place I’d been searching for. My appreciation of the timing was not unfounded. The relief was overwhelming, since I was beginning to think I would die below that floor, and when my body had surely rotted, it would stink out the house. How would they explain it? I wondered, as I turned my body over and rested on my back. I pulled up my knees to my chest and just as I was considering the baby inside my belly, wondering if it was still alive, I gave an almighty kick with both feet.

  As anticipated, the wood of the steps near the attic entrance came away with the mighty force, gained by the strength in my back and a helping of sheer gusto. I turned about once more and crawled out of the space until I found myself on the lower landing of the steps next to the attic entrance. I hoisted up my body with the only ounce of strength I had left, and as I slumped against the side wall, I heard a key turn in the lock.

  When the door slowly opened, I fainted outright.

  “Marley? Marley?”Her voice was so sweet on my ears.

  I opened my eyes and there she was. My darling Celia! When she took my hands in hers, I began to cry. She must surely be wondering why I was there at the entrance, so filthy and unkempt and looking half-dead.

  Despite my ears being clogged by debris from under the floor, I could hear the rain splattering against the tiles on the roof. I couldn’t speak. The sound simply made me thirsty. I leaned on Celia’s shoulder and she helped me to my feet. She wanted to support my weight, unsure if I was hurt, but I broke free of her and stumbled up the steps to my attic. I travelled at what speed I could muster, knowing she was following me, and when I came out the end of the forest of furniture to my parlour, I leaned down, gathered the hem of my dress and pulled it up over my head. I left the filthy garment discarded on the floor when I ran to the window and burst out onto the roof. As the pigeons scattered with fright, I stood upon my rooftop terrace, naked as the day I was born, turning in a circle with my arms outstretched and my head thrown back, as the blissful rain fed my thirst and washed away the remnants of my ordeal.

  Celia threw a blanket around my shoulders and pulled me inside. She guided me towards the bed and gently forced me to lie down. My sodden hair was plastered to my face and I was coughing the dust from my lungs after the water had flushed it from the sides of my parched throat. I was gasping and retching and I don’t know what Celia must have thought.

  She was shaking her head. She looked thin and a little pale, apart from a slight rosy tint to her cheeks. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them. “What happened, Marley? For goodness sake, I must call my mother.”

  I grabbed her hand. “No, please, I’ll be alright in a minute. I just had a fright, that’s all. Just a fright!”

  “It was more than that.”

  I nodded and squeezed her hand. “I got trapped under the floor…” I started coughing again.

  “How...?”

  “I wanted to try and find you. I didn’t know where you were…” Closing my eyes, I pictured myself under the floor. “I went inside my bolthole to see if I could contact you through the ceiling of your room…a pipe or a knot in the wood…anything…but then the groundsman came in with a lady.”

  Celia gasped. “Lottie, the nanny.”

  I nodded. “I think so. They were looking for the rocking horse.” I brushed away the wet hair falling across my eyes. “Before they left they put the cover over my hide-away and placed something upon it. I was trapped.”

  “Oh, my goodness, Marley.”

  “The only thing I could do was make my way over to the entrance and get through the steps. I knew they were rickety, so I prayed that with one big kick I could loosen one of the vertical boards and escape my prison. That’s when you came in.” I took a deep breath as if I had just lived the nightmare all over again. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”

  “As I frightened you.”

  I sat up and flicked my hair behind my neck so that it fell dripping down my back. My lips trembled when I whispered, “I thought you were dead.”

  She cried with me. “I nearly did die. I got influenza. My mother sent me to my aunt for a week to recuperate. Obviously, I couldn’t get a message to you.”

  “Poor Celia. How terrible.”

  “I was worried about you up here alone, wondering where I was, and why I wasn’t coming up to see you. I felt so bad about that, my dear friend.”

  “This is all my fault,” I said with a trembling voice. “If you didn’t have to come up to this draughty old attic, you wouldn’t have caught influenza in the first place. I’m so sorry, Celia.”

  “Now, let’s have none of that. You are here and I am with you. There is nothing to be sorry for. None of this is your fault.”

  I leaned back on the mattress, thinking about giving myself up so that Celia could carry on her life without me to worry about. She must have known what I was thinking when she said, “Come on. Let’s get you dried off and then you can get into bed. We can’t have you catching the same sickness as I, can we?”

  The next day, the memoryof my plight under the floor was still raw in my mind. Whenever I took occasion to think about it, I would scratch my arms and my hair and my breath quickened as if I was re-living the horror of it all over again. Now, I couldn’t imagine ever having the courage to use my bolt hole again. I’d rather to caught and throw in gaol.

  Despite my ordeal, the day became brighter when I finally had the chance to give my Christmas gift to Celia.

  Under the pretence she was going to her room to rest, since she had only been put back on duty part-time while she gained her strength, she arrived around mid-morning carrying a basket of vegetables and fruit. I gasped when she handed the arrangement over to me, taking in the various items. “Pears, apples, a single orange, carrots, onions, a head of celery, looking like a floral arrangement and beautiful white mushrooms dotted around the display between the fruit along with tiny bunches of parsley placed in the gaps. “I can’t believe my eyes,” I said. “How did you get it?”

  The grocer in Mells donated it to me. He has taken a shine to my mother and when he heard I was sick, I reckon he thought he’d play a love card.” Then she winked.

  I shook my head. “But how will you e
xplain…”

  “Worry not. Mother sent me to the larder and told me to put the items with the other fruit and vegetables inside, since they are no use to either of us in their raw form. So, you see, she has no way of knowing if I’ve carried out her instructions or not. Besides they were given to me, so why should the household servants have them? I did keep a couple of pieces for myself…fruit only though. Goodness knows why the man gave vegetables to a sick girl.” Celia snarled prettily. “Really struck by my mam he is!”

  “Well, thank you, Mr Gainsborough,” I chanted as I put the basket in my fabricated kitchen.

  Absentmindedly, Celia asked. “You know him?!”

  I felt quite taken aback by her remark. “Why, Celia! Have you forgotten I once lived in the village and that I know practically everyone who lives in it?”

  Celia looked embarrassed. “I don’t know why I forgot,” she said slowly. “I think my brain must be addled as a result of my sickness.”

  I laughed. “Well, Miss Addled,” I joked. “How about we share that juicy looking orange.”

  She laughed. “No, it’s just for you. I have mine still in my room. Mother said I should save it.”

  “Very well, but you can have a segment or two, can’t you?”

  We both sat on the floor and I took up the orange and cut the peel into four sections with the gentleman’s penknife. Then I removed the four pieces and broke the orange in half, ripping off a segment for Celia. She smiled and placed it in her mouth, biting it in half. I did the same as we both giggled. The juice was like sweet nectar. Nothing else described it.

  I wiped a drip running down my cheek with the back of my hand as I remembered the gift I had for her. I leaned across the bed and slid my hand under the pillow. The package was flat and square, wrapped in white tissue paper, which I’d found in the gentleman’s closet.