by Jane Godman
Chapter Eight
It started with the usual noises. I was reminded of sandpaper being rubbed methodically over wood, followed by a constant chattering of low, small voices. I frowned. Vidor could say what he liked. If there weren’t any mice in the attic, then there must be squirrels. Or maybe bats? But wouldn’t Vidor have noticed them? I had sent him up there enough times. Could a cat have got in through an open window and be trapped up in the clock tower? Or a pigeon? Even—heaven forbid—rats?
I was sitting in my bedroom, trying to read before retiring to bed, but the commotion above me was too distracting. With a determination I didn’t feel, I snatched up the gas lamp and went onto the landing. I had been into the attics several times and seen no sign of animal occupation. Despite Vidor’s assurances to the contrary, the noises must be coming from the clock tower. I regarded the door at the end of the galleried landing doubtfully. I knew that it led to a narrow, spiral staircase that, in turn, led up to the clock tower. I had never been up there, and the door remained locked on Gethin’s orders. There was a set of master keys in the kitchen and, on a mission now, I hurried downstairs on slippered feet to retrieve it.
It took me several tries before I found the key that gave me access to the clock tower. With the dry reluctance of disuse, the door handle creaked as I turned it. I recognised the sound. It was this I had heard on my first night at Taran House just before I saw the lights. The door opened, offering me a glimpse of hollow darkness within. In the novels I’d read, I always wanted to shout at the heroine who didn’t immediately leave the haunted house at the first sign of any sinister goings-on. Indeed, I had been known to hurl a book down in disgust when the protagonist did something silly like…oh, I don’t know, perhaps going up to a creepy clock tower, alone and in the middle of the night. Suddenly, here I was—Lilly Divine—with my foot on the first stair, behaving in exactly the same way! I mounted the winding stairs slowly, mindful of the fact that Ceri had told me they were dangerous. At the halfway twist of the iron structure, I noticed a door. My distracted mind registered that this must be the door that led to the attic room in which I found the satanic shrine. And a bowl of blood! My mind still returned regularly to that fresh, bright, still-unexplained horror. The thought did nothing to enhance my mood. I rounded the top of the stairs on silent feet, trying not to disturb whichever scuttling creature had taken up residence there.
The room was square, and the opaque clock faces on all four sides allowed a vague, moonlit glow to illuminate the space beyond the reach of my lamp. The windows that flanked the clocks gave a 360-degree view of the house and grounds. The room was empty except for an old sofa and a mattress on the floor. The dusty air was agitated, as though there had been movement up there just before I arrived. A vague, familiar smell percolated through the stale atmosphere. For some strange reason, it made me think of Ricky. There were no animals to be seen, just as Vidor had said. The mousetraps he had set at my insistence lay empty in the corners.
I went to one of the windows. The stars were full of bright purpose, close enough for me to reach out, pluck one from the sky and keep it as a souvenir of a perfect night. As I held the lamp aloft, I was seized with the sudden conviction that, if I looked over my shoulder right now, I would see someone standing behind me. Someone—or perhaps something—I did not want to see. The feeling was so strong that I froze, unable to move. My breathing sounded too loud inside my head. My thoughts ticked quietly like a broken clock, and my heart thudded out a different, insistent, irregular rhythm. These noises comforted me. Reminded me I was alive. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, feeling the loathsome cannibal of fear feasting on every part of my body. Anticipating, limbs weighed down with dread, the inhuman hand that was stretching out to touch me.
Then, at last, a heavy footfall clattered at the top of the stairs and Vidor appeared, breaking the spell that held me. I caught my breath and waited for the trembling in my muscles to stop.
“No mouse!” He stated belligerently, sweeping his hand around to take in the whole room. I wanted to hug him, but I decided against it. We didn’t have that sort of relationship.
“No mouse,” I agreed gratefully, and eagerly made my way back down the stairs. The key grated in the lock as I turned it in the door. I followed Vidor down to the kitchen, where Anika was waiting for him. She rolled expressive eyes at me.
“He see light in the tower and want to speak to you about mice,” she said, jerking a scornful thumb at her husband.
“I heard the noises again,” I explained shakily. She looked at me with concern in her eyes.
“Is birds?” she asked, and I shrugged. “You want Vidor should stay here tonight?”
Vidor looked less than enamoured by the suggestion, and I shook my head determinedly. I had allowed my imagination to get the better of me, but I wasn’t prepared to compound the situation by giving in to these irrational fears. Returning the heavy brass ring of keys to its hook beside the range, I thanked Anika and Vidor and wished them goodnight. When they had gone—walking hand in hand through the kitchen garden—I locked the back door. Now that I was alone again, a sly trickle of fear returned to slither down my spine. I grabbed a knife from the wooden butcher’s block and, with the suspicion of an unseemly dash about my movements, I went back up the stairs to my own room. Sliding open the drawer of my bedside locker, I tucked the knife inside. Relief and embarrassment fought each other in my breast. Relief won; the knife would stay.
My book and I settled back down to enjoy each other’s company. The noises began again almost immediately. Lightly at first, they moved back and forth across the floor above my head. But no mouse, bat or bird was responsible for this. What I heard now was unmistakable. Footsteps—human footsteps—paced the length of the clock tower. Gradually, the sound grew louder until it was a repetitive banging, a regular, deliberate thunder crack of stamping feet. The sound bounced wildly around my bedroom and I sat, petrified, for what seemed like an eternity. This was meant for me. A message—and a punishment—for one who had dared to invade the macabre calm of the tower. Eventually, the noise stopped, and the old house sighed heavily before settling into a silent sleep. Not surprisingly, I was unable to follow its lead.
* * *
Pipes. Ancient plumbing. The wooden boards of the clock tower settling after I had disturbed their rest. The damaged spiral staircase coming farther away from the wall. All of these explanations occurred to me. In the cold radiance of midnight, my feverish mind dismissed them. Now, however, as the serene hues of morning dawned, each of them seemed a plausible explanation for the noises I had heard. I sat on the kitchen step as the sun came up. Partial vapours of morning rolled gracefully away to reveal the day. Almond, ash and myrtle spread their protective branches, bestowing a canopy of melancholy shade over the house. Luxuriant woods and vines, encouraged into new growth by the honeyed kisses of early summer, turned the valley beyond the garden’s border into an untamed wilderness. The mingled moans of wild cascades and breezes were nature’s deep music swelling into life. I was so in tune now with the valley’s moods that I could feel every infinitesimal change echoing in my heartbeat.
I thought about it so long and hard that my head began to ache, and I could feel a frown pulling my eyebrows together. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” That was what Sherlock Holmes had said. And who was I to argue? But would the great detective have accepted that the supernatural was possible? That a woman and a girl who were strangers until a few weeks ago could meet up in their dreams? That, between them, they could summon phantom lights and shrieking wild hunters? That they could communicate without words? I accepted, because I knew they were possible. I had experienced them. Those things did happen. Could I begin to eliminate, or ascribe meaning to, the other strange events surrounding Taran House?
Setting the supernatural aside, there were other things that had happened in the house—the break-in, my belongings being moved a
round, the satanic altar with its evidence of fresh activity, Ceri’s near accidents, the noises in the attic that I never heard when I was with Gethin—those things could well be the result of human activity. If that was the case, they were happening for a reason. And the only reason my tired brain could come up with was that someone wanted us—me and Ceri—out of Taran House. Someone who wanted the house for his own diabolical purposes. Bryn Taran was dead. That left one other person, and he would not only inherit the house if Ceri were out of the way, he would also inherit his brother’s money. No matter how hard I argued against it, Gethin was the only person I could think of who would benefit if Ceri was…what? Dead? I buried my face in my hands. It couldn’t be true. I couldn’t be this wrong about him.
“There may be evil here again.” Reverend Lewis’s warning came back to me. I had believed what Gethin told me, and I’d built up the picture of Bryn Taran that he wanted me to see. Evil twin. Lothario. Devil worshipper. What if—my mind tried to shy away from the thought, but I pursued it relentlessly—Gethin was the evil presence here at Taran House? My room and the nursery had been ransacked on a day when we were all in the garden, but Gethin had come out a full hour after us. What could be easier than for him to go through those rooms and then come out and join us? No one could have broken into the house while so many people were working in the garden, and no common thief would bother with the nursery and the governess’s room. When I started this job, Gethin had implied that he would rarely visit Taran House. The drive from London took five or six hours, even for Gethin, who drove fast. Yet he was spending more and more time here, often turning up unexpectedly. Something was pulling him remorselessly back to the valley. Ceri had survived two potentially fatal accidents, both of them while Gethin was here. The blood on the satanic altar was fresh, but Bryn Taran had been in his grave for months. Gethin, however, was very much alive. My treacherous lips tingled with remembered longing at the thought.
But if Gethin really intended to murder Ceri, why had he brought me here? Why not just kill her while she was in his power, with only the apathetic Mrs Price to worry about? I was hardly most people’s first choice of governess, however. So if someone wanted an independent witness, perhaps the giddy, gullible girl from the burlesque show was an ideal choice. He knew I had no family, my best friend was dead and my other friends were hardly the most conventional or law-abiding group. Get her to fall for the handsome boss. She’s halfway there already, swilling back champagne and making eyes at him in between taking her clothes off. If the plan goes awry, the silly little tart will swear black is white in the witness box if he asks her to…I was savage in my self-loathing. Only I wasn’t a dupe—or even a scapegoat, if that was his intention—and Gethin was well aware of that. Now. He knew how fiercely I was attached to Ceri. If he did indeed have a fiendish plan, my devotion to her was not part of it. It was “damnably inconvenient,” to use his own phrase.
I didn’t hear Ceri until she sat down next to me on the step. “I wasn’t sure about him at first, but I don’t think Uncle Gethin is the Hunter,” she said softly.
I believed her. I wanted to believe her so much that it hurt my throat. She leaned against me and I rested my cheek on the top of her head. We sat like that until Anika, humming a song to herself, appeared through a gap in the hedge that bordered the field.
* * *
“It does get a bit dull at the pub in the evenings,” Matthew confessed. It was one of those rare days when the valley became a place of purity and enchantment. The sky was a vault of brilliant blue and the sunbeams in the trees looked like they were being strained through honey. Lazy bees lumbered between blazing blooms and were put to shame by shimmering dragonflies whizzing past. We paused to view a long rise of verdant pasture that ended abruptly in the buckled ridge of the mountain cirque. Ceri had stayed with Anika to help her make a cake. Shucky accompanied me as far as the village, but I had not seen him since. He had bestowed friendly greeting upon Matthew and then taken himself off. An occasional flurry of activity in the woods led me to believe, however, that he was not too far away.
“Come to dinner,” I said impulsively.
“That’s awfully kind of you.” He held out a hand to help me over a series of stones that crossed the babbling stream. “Won’t he—your boss—object?” I had noticed before that his expression was always cold when he spoke of Gethin.
“Mr Taran is in London.” The mention of Gethin’s name had the effect of instantly lowering my mood. His words about not permitting me to entertain gentlemen at Taran House burned themselves into my memory. He would not be happy if he heard Matthew had been a visitor while he was away. “And it’s none of his business,” I declared with a toss of my head, and a bravado I did not quite feel.
“I’d really like that.” His eyes were warm on my face. Since the kiss incident, he had kept his distance, but I sensed he would have liked our relationship to be something more than friendship. I became aware that he still had hold of my hand, and I gently withdrew it. It seemed for a moment that he might be about to say something more. I sought for a way to stall him and relief came from an unlikely source. Shucky burst out of the trees at that moment and bustled importantly up to us. He had the air of a dog who has interrupted urgent business of his own to ensure all was well with me. He nudged my hand with a dirt-encrusted nose, and implied that I might like to accompany him into the wood. I declined and we set off for home instead.
“Six o’clock.” I turned back to Matthew, and was jolted by the expression on his face. The genial look was gone and he was watching Shucky with dislike. It was so unexpected that I stopped, a question forming on my lips. Matthew must have observed my surprise because he grinned sheepishly and waved his hand before striding out toward the village. Not everyone liked dogs, I reminded myself, with a shrug. And Shucky was definitely an acquired taste.
I agonised over what to wear. I liked Matthew, but I didn’t want to encourage him into thinking there might ever be anything between us. There wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Gethin Taran might be the most infuriating man in the whole world, but I belonged to him, whether he wanted me or not. If I looked like I’d dressed for the occasion, Matthew might get the wrong idea. On the other hand, he was an invited guest so some sort of effort was required. With a sigh, I drew on a summery cotton dress with short sleeves and a full skirt. Crossly, I studied my face in the mirror. Country living had played havoc with my hair and complexion. I’d completely given up on trying to tame my curls, and, lightened by the sun, they clustered like a halo about my head. Outdoor life had tinged my skin with gold and darkened the smattering of freckles across my nose. I sighed moodily and Ceri, watching me from the doorway, came up and put sympathetic arms around me.
“You have a very nice mouth,” she consoled me kindly. “And your eyes look like puddles with the sun on them.”
I was outside cutting roses, so I happened to see Matthew approaching the house. He didn’t notice me as he emerged from the tunnel of trees that canopied the drive, and I was able to observe his reaction to the house. I felt a proprietorial sense of pride about Taran House that, I was painfully aware, was out of all proportion to my role. I tried to view it, through a stranger’s eyes, to recapture the sensation of seeing it for the first time. A feeling—half shame, half regret—at my own initial impression turned my cheeks the same faded rose as the blooms I held. But I hadn’t known then how to listen to the memories this old house wished to share, or how to feel the pain of its bitter legacy.
Matthew wore a dark trenchcoat, and he paused, straight backed, hands in his pockets, as he surveyed the impressive facade from beneath the brim of his trilby. I was used to seeing an open, boyish expression on his face, but now, when there was no requirement for him to interact with other people, his features appeared rather stern. Cruel. The word darted through my mind and was lost as I continued to watch him. He tilted his head up, and as his gaze took in the clock tower, an odd, triumphant little smile flickered. It was not a pleas
ant expression, and I decided it was time to make my presence known.
“Old houses have their own moods, don’t they? Sometimes they can seem sad,” I said, strolling forward to greet him.
Another smile—the eager expression with which I was familiar—dawned instantly. “Indeed. But this one, I feel, does not suffer that fate. It is something of a treasure.” He cast another swift glance upward as we stepped inside.
Dinner was surprisingly successful. Anika had made a pie and cooked a variety of vegetables, and Ceri’s cake was tasty if a little lopsided. Shucky disgraced himself by being overly familiar toward Matthew all through dinner. He seemed to think they were destined to be great friends, a feeling Matthew clearly did not share. When Matthew tried to get up from the table, Shucky made a gleeful lunge toward him.
“Scheisse!” The unfriendly look I had seen on Matthew’s face when he looked at Shucky earlier that day returned. It was even more pronounced now. Vidor was summoned to forcibly remove the errant hound, and Matthew confessed ruefully that he had always been rather nervous around dogs. They seemed, he said, to sense his discomfort and were inclined to adopt a superior stance toward him.
