by Anne Fine
I followed him and saw poor Molly slumped on the flagstones. Cook had already raised her lolling head to cradle it against her knees. I don’t know what suspicion was in my mind that, rather than take the chance to watch a man pursue the skills I one day hoped to learn, I chose to shut the door and creep away along the passage and across the hall, back to the doctor’s study.
I leaned over his chair to lift what he’d been reading off the floor. It was a magazine called Country Mansions.
And what had secrecy to do with those? For I was sure his sudden – almost guilty – look had something more about it than simply being caught avoiding work. Curious, I skimmed the pages, flicking through densely written articles on property and fishing rights, and etchings of gatehouse lodges and old manor houses, each illustration finer than the next.
And then I saw it. It was a watercolour painting of my own doll’s house. Across the top was printed, Private Advertisement, and underneath the picture were the words: Respectable gentleman would be grateful to receive from any subscriber details of this place of residence, once called High Gates.
Beside that was a box number to which contributors could write. Now I remembered Sophie’s tease about the artist who had charmed her sister. Once I’d assured myself he hadn’t used his brushes on my doll’s house, I hadn’t given him another thought. I suppose, like Sophie, I had just assumed the painting had been ordered in some vain hope of cheering me after my mother’s death.
Now I knew differently. For it was clear that Dr Marlow had remembered what I’d said about the doll’s house being the mirror image of my mother’s home.
He had set out to find my history on my behalf.
I know I should have felt nothing but gratitude. I should have felt a flood of warmth for him, and told myself this family’s kindness to me would have no end. But I’ll be honest, it was fear I felt. Fear and resentment. Hadn’t I faced enough upheaval, losing my mother and my home? So what would be so terrible about forgetting my grim past and letting me become a happy member of their family? A brother to his girls. A son to him and Mrs Marlow.
I wished I’d told him nothing more about the doll’s house than that it was mine. I wished he hadn’t tried so hard to do the right thing by a boy so strangely uprooted. But, most of all, I prayed that nothing would come of his attempt to find whatever might be left of my real family. I hoped that he’d heard nothing from the readers of Country Mansions – and that he never would!
Hastily I dropped the magazine back on the floor and left the room – and only just in time. Already I could hear his footsteps in the passage.
‘Is she all right?’ I asked, trying to look as if the reason I was in the hall was to hear news of Molly.
‘She’ll do,’ he said. ‘It happens often enough. She has no iron in her blood.’ He laughed. ‘And no more inclination to take advice than most of my patients.’ He glanced at the clock ticking away in its unhurried fashion. ‘But I must get back to my desk.’
Without another word he walked into his study and shut the door. And whether it was seeing the portrait of High Gates that set my feet the other way, I’ve no idea. But I turned back into the drawing room. Since Sophie first set eyes on the doll’s house, I’d rarely had the chance to be alone with it. Now it stood drenched in the sunlight pouring through the windowpanes. The painted roses shone. The ivy coiling up the walls gleamed quite as dark and strongly as if each leaf was freshly grown.
I swung the front open and let my fingers prowl around the rooms, setting a chair straight and putting a tiny bowl of carved fruit back on the polished sideboard where it belonged. I had no wish to start a private game for fear the girls might come back from their dancing class and catch me playing like a child. Still, all these dolls had been so dear to me, and it had been a good few weeks since I had touched them. So out of the box came Topper first, then pouting Rubiana. Hal was the next. A scarlet thread trailed from the beret that my mother had crocheted to hide the scar where I broke off his crown. If she’d still been alive, she would have used her tiny tools to catch it up in an instant.
The sense of loss came as a stabbing pain. I drew my knees up to my chin and clasped them tightly as tears fell so fast that everything blurred. Is that why, suddenly, the doll’s house seemed so real? Why Topper seemed to stretch a little in his sleep on the rag rug? Why, when I reached out a hand to pick up Mrs Golightly – that thin peg doll that looked so like my mother – her eyes seemed to hold me in a steady gaze?
I blinked away the tears. I wasn’t yet so far from childhood that I’d forgotten that a doll – however bland its face – can share your every mood. But still Mrs Golightly’s bright eyes held mine. No, more than that! They looked at me with fierce need.
I heard my own voice whispering, ‘What do you want? What must I do for you?’
And then the spell was broken. Behind me, I heard the front door sweep across the tiles and cheerful voices in the hall.
The door flew open. ‘Daniel!’
What I had feared now came as a relief. Sophie was back, to catch me sitting at the doll’s house and demand a part to play in whatever story I could hastily invent. Sophie was here, to throw herself down beside me on the rug, chattering merrily about her visit to the town – and banish shadows.
Or so I thought.
But from that day something began to happen in our games. It seemed as if another soul had joined us. The strange two-ended doll took over all our stories. A dozen times a week I’d say to Sophie, ‘Let’s leave it out of this adventure.’ But every time at some point we would need a fresh-faced, mischievous boy to join with Hal, and she would reach for it again. Or, in a tale of pirates, ‘Now we need someone who can run the ship. Let it be Captain Severin.’
Curious, I asked her, ‘Severin? Why do you call him that?’
She shrugged. ‘The name just sprang to mind – perhaps because the poor thing’s in two halves.’
I must have looked quite blank because she added with a laugh, ‘A doll that someone chose to “sever in” two!’ She tipped the skirts so that the man stood upright. ‘Yes! Captain Severin can play the part.’
She handed him to me. I couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t join the game. He was a doll, no bigger than my hand. But still I felt unease, for every time this doll was in a story, that story changed. We might be halfway through some careless tale of rivers crossed or mountains climbed, but, with the very presence of the new arrival, the nature of the game would shift from innocence and merriment into pure menace.
Or even cruelty. Where, before, Sophie and I would solve a mystery with questions or cunning, once that new doll joined in we’d find ourselves depending on threats and blackmail, even on punishments. I’d find myself locking my precious Hal away in stinking dungeons, or staking his poor body out where ants could torment him. And at my side, the child who’d once insisted on helping her guilty brigands escape from transportation now cheerfully pressed for all of them to be strung up on gibbets without the mercy of a trial.
And there was more. Sometimes I’d hear a voice I didn’t recognize, and turn to check that it was truly Sophie making that deep and threatening growl. Had she learned tricks of the voice-thrower’s trade? ‘You pin him down while I lash him with chains! I’ll make the beggar talk!’
I’d steal another glance her way. Her large blue eyes flashed with ferocious greed. Her fists clenched and unclenched as though in frenzy. Even her teeth looked sharper.
‘Sophie?’
She’d turn, and there’d be madness in her eyes.
‘Sophie!’
She would look baffled, toss her head as if to shake away a dream, then be herself again.
One day I crammed all of the dolls back in the box. ‘I won’t play any longer.’
‘Oh, Daniel!’ But it was as if she knew the reason already. ‘Suppose we put the Severin doll away?’
‘That’s what we’ve said before.’
‘This time we’ll truly do it.’
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‘We’ve claimed a dozen times we’ll leave him in the doll box. And, every time, out he has come again.’
‘That’s true.’ Ruefully she inspected the doll that, from the moment we broke off the game, had turned back to a harmless stick of wood, some cloth and paint, patches of glued-on hair. She flipped it over to the man. ‘This end’s the worst,’ she declared. ‘The boy has a nature primed for spite and wickedness, but doesn’t yet have powers to spoil the game.’
‘We are the masters of the dolls,’ I tried reminding her.
‘Not this one,’ she said calmly. ‘This doll can make things happen.’
My unease grew. ‘Sophie, we are both old enough to know that’s nonsense.’
‘And we’ve sat through enough wrecked games to know it’s true.’
I couldn’t argue. Sophie snatched up the doll and jumped to her feet. She ran to the small woven basket in which her mother kept her sewing silks, and scrabbled in its depths until, in triumph, she fetched up a pin. ‘We’ll keep the man entombed in skirts and darkness!’ She stuck the sharp end of the pin into the folds of stuff. ‘Go in! Go through!’
‘Sophie …’
I prised the doll out of her hand. She’d rammed the pin so hard into the skirts that its sharp point had stuck in the wood beneath. I pulled it out and turned the doll to see what damage she’d done.
The pin had gashed the man’s cheek, scraping off the thinnest line of paint. She snatched him back. ‘I’ll be more careful, I promise.’ Then she changed her mind. ‘I know! Mary will help us.’
‘Mary will laugh at us for making a phantom out of a handful of carved wood.’
‘Oh, I won’t tell her any of that,’ Sophie said cheerfully. ‘She’d think we’d lost our minds.’
Sure of the truth in that, I followed her into the dining room where Mary was sitting in the morning light, darning a stocking.
‘Put that aside!’ ordered Sophie. ‘We need your help to sew these skirts up tight.’
Her sister lifted her eyes from her stitching only to say, ‘A simple enough task. Why can’t you do it yourself?’
But Sophie thrust the doll at her again. ‘See? They fall so thickly. We need them sewing up so tight that they can’t be unpicked.’
Mary lifted her stocking to inspect her own progress. ‘Then sew them up the best you can,’ she told her sister mildly. ‘And don’t unpick them.’
Sophie was adamant. ‘No. You must do it, Mary. You can do it tighter and better.’
She didn’t add the words aloud, but I knew they were in her mind: ‘And then we will be safer, Daniel and I.’
That week, in church, the vicar gave a sermon. ‘The devil walks,’ he said. ‘Make no mistake. And evil is not ugly. You cannot tell, simply from looking at a man, the colour of his soul.’
He raised his arms as if to comfort us.
‘But we have one defence, and one alone. The devil can make no headway if he has no help. For him to triumph, we must invite him in.’
On the way out, Sophie dropped back till she was walking beside me. ‘Daniel, were you listening? Did you hear?’
‘About the devil?’
‘Yes.’ She patted me as if I were some child who needed comfort. ‘So we will keep him in the box. We’ll not invite him in. And we’ll be safe.’
More weeks passed, and I grew in height and strength. Part of me knew I couldn’t stay for ever and this must be some sort of holding time. But I’d so little experience of the world I couldn’t guess for what we might be waiting.
It turned out to be probate.
One evening Dr Marlow strode across the lawn holding a letter. After a few short pleasantries about the day, he ordered his daughters into the house, and sat beside me on the grass.
‘Daniel, your mother’s will is finally proved.’
I must have looked quite blank for, though Mrs Marlow claimed I was coming on apace, my education hadn’t yet turned into that of a lawyer.
‘All her affairs are sorted,’ he explained. ‘And much as I would have loved to tell you that you’re secure, with money of your own, I must confirm my own worst fears. We’ve found no money tucked away, so now your mother’s belongings have been sold to pay her debts, there’s nothing left.’
Up until then, I hadn’t given my inheritance a thought. But Dr Marlow was clearly sitting waiting for some response, so I said, ‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’
‘Nothing of value.’ He stared uneasily at the grass between his bent knees. ‘The poor soul lost so much in life we could not think of taking her wedding ring from her finger, even after death. So there is just your doll’s house, and one small token that came with your mother to the hospital. You must have that.’ He reached into his pocket. ‘It’s a pretty thing.’
My heart turned over when he pulled it out. It was the tiny ivory case, no longer than my finger, in which my mother had kept her lace-making tools.
I put out a hand, then, in a thought, recoiled. ‘But was this in her pocket when …?’
I couldn’t speak the words. But Dr Marlow hastened to assure me, ‘No, no. The matron found it tucked in a scallop of your mother’s dress when she was first brought to the hospital. Fearing that she might use it to harm herself, or others, she locked it in a desk. And there it lay forgotten for a while. But once it came to light I must admit that I asked Matron to misplace it quietly again, until the bailiffs were done with their grasping.’ He pressed it in my hand. ‘I thought that, after probate was complete, it might be a comfort for you to have at least one tiny token of your mother.’
One tiny token.
Unscrewing the top, I spilled the set of miniature tools into my hand. They lay like four pretty matchsticks. ‘That’s all I have of her?’
‘For now.’ His voice took on the most mysterious tone. ‘But we have hopes of finding something linked to you that’s more substantial.’
Maybe he thought I’d press to understand his meaning, and wheedle out his secret about the painting of High Gates and its good purpose. But I couldn’t trust myself to show even a small pretence of gratitude for efforts to find me some other home. So I just tipped the tools back, screwed on the top and slid the little ivory case deep into my pocket. And then I thanked him for his thoughtfulness and hurried off.
But I kept watch. And finally one morning, from upstairs on the landing, I saw the doctor open one of the envelopes that had been lying on the tray, only to draw out another from inside. Opening that, he read it through and then looked up.
Seeing me watching him, he said uneasily, ‘Good day, young fellow.’
I came downstairs and followed him into the room where breakfast waited. The doctor leaned across to murmur something to his wife before she said our grace. It seemed a strangely restless meal, with Sophie casting curious glances, first at my own set face, then at her father. Even the imperturbable Mrs Marlow appeared unsettled. Cecilia and Mary chatted away as usual about their plans for the day; but even they must have guessed something was afoot because they didn’t show the least surprise when, as Molly sidled in to clear away the dishes, the doctor turned to me and said, ‘Come to my study, Daniel. We must have a talk about your future.’
I hung my head so low I might have been following him onto a tumbrel. ‘Now, now,’ he scolded me as soon as we were alone. ‘I have good news for you, not bad. We’ve found the model for your doll’s house!’
He sounded so proud that I couldn’t bear it. ‘I wish you hadn’t!’ I burst out. ‘Is it far away? Oh, I am sure it must be! It will be far across the country, or we’d have learned of it before. And I’ll be sent away to family who don’t know and don’t want me, and never see anyone here again!’
He looked appalled. Placing his hands flat on the desk, he stared at me. We sat together in silence. Finally he almost whispered, ‘Daniel, I had no choice. We had a moral duty to try to find your own real family.’
‘You let the lace-making tools lie hidden!’ I accused him. ‘And you allowed the do
ll’s house to be carried here before it could be sold to pay the grocer! Why did you have to act on one tiny thing I told you and set all this in train?’
I’d said too much. His eyebrows lifted. ‘You knew? You knew of the advertisement I placed in Country Mansions?’
‘I knew about the painting,’ I told him sullenly. ‘I saw the magazine and guessed the rest.’
It was, he clearly knew, no time to take me to task for snooping round his study. So, brushing that aside, he tried to comfort me again. ‘Daniel, this could be good for you.’
‘I’m happy here.’
Sighing, he waited. But I had nothing more to say, I just stared at the floor. After a moment Dr Marlow took a more businesslike tone. Waving a letter at me, he said, ‘This comes from someone who was once the postmistress in a small place called Illingworth.’
I waited.
‘It’s on the downs,’ he added.
I still kept silent. He pressed on. ‘The downs are chalk hills, near the coast.’
‘Ten thousand miles away!’
‘Two hundred,’ he admitted.
‘Write to this lady,’ I begged. ‘Tell her the artist did a careless job and she must be mistaken.’
‘Daniel, she says the painting is the very image of a place called High Gates, and when she left for London several years ago the owner was a man called Severn.’
Severn? How could I help but look a little startled?
Dr Marlow leaned across the desk to peer more closely at my face and ask me curiously, ‘You know the name?’
I shook my head. First Severin and then Severn? But why should I reckon some half echo of a trick of words from Sophie was any more than a coincidence?
‘No, sir. I never heard of any person called that.’
Still, I was filled with unease. But whether my disquiet stemmed from not being frank with someone who’d been kind to me, or whether even then I knew the cause lay deeper, it is hard to say.
The doctor shrugged. ‘My correspondent says this Captain Severn—’
