by Katie M John
Jeremiah was about to dismiss the idea and then thought better of it. It was surprisingly heavy in his hand.
When he returned to his room, he sat down in one of the two nursing chairs either side of the fireplace. He wished it was lit so that he could lose himself in the flames. He poured himself a large tumbler of brandy, convincing himself it was for medicinal purposes. It was in this way he sat, drinking and staring blankly at the empty chair opposite him until the clock headed towards the midnight hour. He allowed the film of his romance with Rachel to play out in his head. She had been so beautiful, so full of life, with a mind so artfully constructed that you couldn’t help but fall in love with her. But he realized, as the internal film played out, that the love he felt for her was not a shared love; it was the same way one might fall in love with a painting or a song. It was something that moved your soul in the most intimate and private way, but never really belonged to you.
His eyelids were heavy with the alcohol. Finally, he stopped fighting and let his eyes close, only to wake a moment later and find the fire lit and Paulina sat in the chair opposite him.
“You’re not real,” he managed to slur.
She smiled and reached forward to take his empty tumbler from him before topping it up from the almost empty decanter. She curled her legs up underneath her, giving him a momentary flash of stocking underneath her olive-green wiggle skirt. Her hair burned amber in the firelight.
“Real? Not real?” she shrugged, “There’s not that much between it – not really.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“You know who I am, silly!” she laughed flirtatiously.
He rubbed his eyes, hoping the dream would dispel, but she stubbornly sat there smiling at him.
“Okay,” he paused, “are you alive?”
She let out a laugh. “Oh, this is such fun. It’s like one of those silly parlour games Eddie used to like to play.” She straightened her face, trying to make it serious but only achieving a pouting, sultry look. “No, I’m not alive. Next question,” she said, leaning forward coquettishly.
“What were you doing in the photograph that we took at The Rookeries?”
Jeremiah watched as a shadow flitted over her face and he knew she wasn’t enjoying the game anymore. She tugged subconsciously at her ringlets, and wrinkled her nose.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“Well, I do.”
She tipped back the tumbler. “They sent me away because I was…” she faltered, “I was unwell.”
“Unwell? What was wrong with you?”
“I’m not meant to talk about it.”
“Who says?”
“Penelope.”
“Aunt Penelope? What has she got to do with it?”
“Everything.” Her voice whimpered and her eyes filled with tears. “I brought shame to the family and she dealt with it. It’s what Aunt Penelope does – that’s her role – she deals with family shame.”
Jeremiah thought back to the conversation he’d had with her in the library. Everything about that conversation had been so polished to the point he had thought she had rehearsed it, but it wasn’t that, it was a speech that she had given many times before to many different errant Chase family members.
He reached forward and took the glass, thinking he was in no danger of getting any drunker than he obviously already was. Paulina wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I need to know. Maybe I can help,” he said.
Paulina shook her head.
“It’s got something to do with The Rookeries, hasn’t it?” he pressed.
Paulina nodded. “The Asylum for the Insane and Morally Dissolute. I guess I fell into the latter category.”
“Me and you both,” Jeremiah said raising his glass, to which she raised a sad, tight smile.
“That’s why you are here?” she asked.
Jeremiah nodded. “And you? Why did your family send you to Aunt Penelope’s Correctional Institute?”
“I wasn’t sent to be corrected, it was just after the war and Penelope’s brothers had been killed in Ypres. Penelope was here with her husband. They were strange times, full of loss and this weird sense of having to embrace every moment; It was like a year-long party. A kind of up-yours to the death that had surrounded us for so long – thing got out of hand.” Paulina glanced down at her belly and her hand subconsciously swept it.
“Oh,” Jeremiah sighed. “You were with child?”
“No,” she let out a bitter snort of laughter. “I was with shame.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. We are together now, me and my baby boy.”
Jeremiah’s cocked eyebrow invited her to tell her story; something later he wished he had not done. On top of all the sadness he already felt, Paulina’s story stretched his heart to breaking point.
“I fell for the stable hand – a completely unsuitable match” She smiled wryly, but like I said, everything was different after the war – the whole traditional class system had broken; we’d learned that a lord could die in just the same ugly way as a servant, and those things like social value all seemed a bit of joke . “When the baby began to show, and the servants began to whisper, Penelope packed my case and walked me to The Rookeries, reassuring me that it had once all been a maternity hospital.
“The labour was fierce and it was only the thought of holding my baby in my arms that pulled me through. But when I woke, the baby was gone.
“They moved me downstairs from the maternity ward to the lunatic cells using drugs and other… procedures to “fix” me. I was apparently an interesting case worthy of special note.”
She stopped to stifle a sob.
“Eventually, Aunt Penelope, hearing what brutal techniques they were using, stepped in and rescued me, bringing me back to Coldstone House. Then one of the kitchen girls let slip that a young couple from the village had been given my baby.”
Jeremiah sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, Paulina. I’m really sorry.”
She drank deeply and looked at him for a long time before whispering, “Me, too.”
A heavy silence settled between them. She was lost for a moment in her grief.
“I killed us both. I stole him from his pram, and when the police came to take him away, I jumped from the nursery window. We both died instantly.”
Jeremiah stifled his response. There was nothing – absolutely nothing – he could say.
“I thought the angels would save us, but the angels never came,” she said wistfully.
“And now you’re stuck here on Earth?” he whispered.
She nodded. “I guess it’s better than being in Hell.”
“And it was you we saw at The Rookeries?”
“Yes, sometimes I find myself back there. I don’t know how. It’s never for long, but it feels like a lifetime. It was a bad place, Jeremiah. A terrible place.”
“I can only imagine.”
She shook her head. “No you can’t – it’s beyond imagination. It wasn’t just the whole medical brutality thing – there were other evils.”
“Other evils?”
“Evils to do with the Ravenheart family,” she whispered. “True evils.”
Jeremiah sat forward, imploring her to say more, but she was fading before his very eyes.
“Stay away from there, Jeremiah; it’s full of Witchcraft,” she warned. Then she was gone and with her, the fire faded, too.
*
Jeremiah woke the next day with a pounding headache, still slumped in the chair. It took him a while for his groggy head to reboot the events of the previous night, and even then, it was hard for him to truly understand which of them were real and which were a dream.
He stretched out his limbs and felt the knots in his muscles protest under such rough treatment. He could tell from the flat-white light that it was already late into the morning. He was surprised his sergeant major aunt had not come and rudely woken him and
sent him packing off to college. He was at least being allowed one day to come to terms with the death of his ex.
He stood, yawning and regretting hitting the brandy as hard as he had. He gathered up his towel and headed towards the cold, white sterility of the bathroom down the hall.
“For such a bloody wealthy family, you’d have thought they could install some en-suites,” he grumbled. But then, I suppose that kind of luxury might spoil us. He thought back to what Paulina had said about Aunt Penelope, “She deals with family shame.” And that was what he had become – a family shame.
With little choice other than ice-cold or scalding hot, he flicked the shower to cold and braced himself for the punishment. The water hit his skin like needles, giving him precious inability to think. After several gasps for air and a quick rub down, he hopped out and headed back towards his room, which at least was warm thanks to the over-efficient central heating system on the first floor. Paulina’s visit last night, had given him a purpose with which to fill his day and he was grateful. He couldn’t bear to spend the day thinking over his times with Rachel, nor the manner in which she had died – or by whose instruction.
He shook his head, loosening wet droplets from his hair, and slid into a pair of grey sports and a black t-shirt. He had no intention of going anywhere; he had too much to do. There was checking out Paulina’s story for starters, and then the rather murkier world of the Ravenheart family. What with his uncle’s Vatican interest, and the comments from Paulina last night, he knew there was much more to their family than a large fancy house and a bloodline.
He flicked open the lid of his laptop and then phoned down to the kitchen in the hope Aunt Penelope’s butler, Vincent, might be lurking down there and would be able to make him a cafétiere of coffee. Calling on the staff wasn’t something he’d normally do but he didn’t relish roaming around the house and possibly bumping into his aunt; especially not with his self-inflicted booming headache. He’d made a resolution to avoid her at all costs today. He really did not want a trip down family lane, not when he was so busy researching other peoples’ lives.
After a quick conversation in which Vincent insisted he bring breakfast as well as coffee, Jeremiah settled down to his day of work. Firstly, he searched for the story of Paulina Chase in the archives of the national papers, recalling her reference to it being post-war, he searched the years 1949-1952. There appeared to be no media mention of the event, which was surprising given the notoriety of the family and the scandal the event must have created at the time; then Jeremiah remembered his aunt’s words about the family infiltrating every aspect of life including the media and he wondered if it were possible the family had paid to have the whole scandal covered up.
At last, after much clicking into dead ends, he found record of it in the local Fallford Times. The website was hard to navigate and he guessed some poor work-experience kid had been given the joyful task of scanning and uploading the archived articles. Eventually, he found it; a small, sorry article that offered very little information other than there had been the death of a female and a child at Coldstone House. Police did not seek anybody else in connection with the death and the rest of the article comprised of the funeral arrangements, which were to take place in the family chapel with a strict family only rule.
Jeremiah sighed heavily and thought back to the image of Paulina sat opposite him. She had been so beautiful and full of life, and just like Rachel, her only crime had been to fall in love.
“You and us all,” he whispered into the air. A knock at the door caused him to jump from his thoughts. It was Vincent, carrying in a tray of boiled eggs, toast, and coffee. The old sod looked even more miserable than usual but Jeremiah had enough woes to carry without asking what was up with the butler. He flashed him an appreciative smile and remained silent until Vincent shuffled out. The events of the last twenty-four hours had left Jeremiah with very little appetite and so he passed over the eggs, pouring out the thick tar-like coffee and spooning in three spoonfuls of sugar.
He sat back down in front of the screen and sipped at his coffee. The bitter sweetness of it provided a momentary distraction until thoughts of Rachel crept up on him. Before he could stop himself, his vision blurred with tears. Jeremiah rarely cried; in fact, the last time he remembered crying was when he had been eight and he had fallen out of the old peach tree in his grandfather’s garden causing him to break his wrist.
Time passed, the coffee cooled. The day turned from white to grey as the heavy snow clouds gathered. Jeremiah shivered and he noted how the heating must have clicked off. He got up, picked up his sweater from the chair and stood in front of the ceiling to floor window, which looked out over the grounds. He watched the first snowflakes fall. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He was searching for some sense, for some reason why Rachel had died but there wasn’t any – other than the terrifying thought it had been his father. As he stood there meditating, his attention was pulled to a figure moving near the tree line. He leaned in further and focused. It was a woman with a child on her hip. She had one arm extended out into the snow. Even from this distance, Jeremiah could see she was laughing. Then she twirled around, catching the snowflakes in her hand. As if sensing Jeremiah watching, she stopped and looked over in the direction of the house before raising a hand and waving. Jeremiah shook his head and pressed his eyes together firmly, refusing to believe the dead Paulina, conjured up by his alcohol-fuelled brain, was now standing in the garden waving at him. When he opened them, she had gone.
“I’m going mad!” he said to himself as he ran his hands firmly over his face checking he was still awake.
Impulsively, he grabbed his keys from his desk and swept out of the room and down the stairs in a half-jog, escaping the house and its ghosts. The front door banged heavily behind him. He headed towards the garage where he jumped up into his newly traded Range Rover. The gravel slipped beneath the tyres as he pulled hastily away from the house. The further he moved away from Coldstone House, the calmer he felt. He had no idea where he was going; all he knew was, he needed to leave the whole goddamned Chase institute behind him.
The snow fell steadily. The fields were quickly powdered in a fine coating of snow. He spent an hour driving around the snaking lanes of the surrounding countryside until the snow began to fall too heavily for the windscreen wipers to work effectively. With most of the landscape whited out, it wasn’t long before Jeremiah found himself completely lost and regretting not having loaded the updates onto the inbuilt Sat Nav system. It was now stubbornly refusing to come to his rescue.
“Great!” he said, slamming his fist into the steering wheel.
The wind had picked up and the snow was driving to the sides of the road where it was beginning to build up rapidly. He slowed the four-by-four down and crept along, peering out through the snow in the hope of seeing some lights or buildings in the distance. The whole landscape was nothing but a white billowing sheet. He continued creeping forward until, with relief, he saw a large pair of wrought iron gates on his left. They were held open by a choker of ivy, giving a sense of elegant decay. He stopped the car and wound down the window, hoping to be able to see what they might be guarding. Far in the distance, at the end of a very long driveway flanked by skeleton Cyprus trees, he could just about make out the blue shadow of a large country house. He wound up the window and turned the car slowly into the driveway. As he passed through the gates, he smiled at the sight of a large black raven shaking the snow from her wings.
“Great, as if this couldn’t get any more Edgar Allen Poe!” he said through nervous laughter.
He crept up the drive, hoping someone might be home, and then hoping that whoever it was didn’t also own a dungeon and have a taste for young American flesh.
Eventually, he arrived at the turning circle, which was made from an ornate fountain covered in icicles and topped by some poor naked stone cherub blowing a trumpet. He killed the engine and stepped out into the blizzard, peering up at the
imposing gothic frontage. He pulled the bell ring, hopping from one foot to another as he waited for a reply. Just as he was about to give up, the sound of deep barking and a female voice commanding the beast to, “Be quiet!” came from the other side of the heavily carved door.
The door swung open to reveal a very beautiful young woman dressed in a heavy, floor-length crimson skirt and black polo neck. She was draped in a heavy paisley shawl and her black tresses fell to her waist. Jeremiah was rendered completely spellbound by the girl’s appearance, finding himself unusually lost for charm and words. But it wasn’t just her looks that left him speechless – something was happening with his vision; some kind of visual disturbance. She was suddenly bathed in purple light and the vision came with a crazy burst of deep rage. Jeremiah shook his head, trying to shake the inexplicable aggression off. He was tired and overwrought; his emotions scattered to the winds.
“Yes?” she asked in a haughty voice. It was the kind of voice that could turn a lion into a mouse.
Both the light and the rage faded as quickly as they had appeared. Jeremiah stumbled over his thoughts and wrapped his arms tighter around his body. “Sorry to disturb you, it’s just that I’ve been caught out by the weather and I was wondering if I could use your telephone. I know it’s a complete imposition but…” Jeremiah’s words were cut short by the low menacing growl of the giant black Doberman by her hip.
The girl looked bemused by Jeremiah’s whole situation and broke into a smile. “Come in,” she said, waving him in and stepping back to let him through.
Jeremiah, fearful he might lose a limb, hesitated. Seeing him nervous, she reached out a hand and patted the dog on the head, “Now, Shadow, be nice to our guest.” She turned to face Jeremiah, looking him up and down in a way that made Jeremiah feel suddenly naked. “Sorry about Shadow, he’s not used to guests. He’s completely harmless. Don’t be afraid.”
