The Secrets of Castle Du Rêve

by Hannah Emery

  ‘I’d like that,’ Victoria said, her heart aching with something like longing with the memory of Robert Bell and his talk that she’d attended with Harry. It had only been a few weeks ago but already, that clear, perfect point in time when she’d thought that Harry could be her husband within a few months seemed like another lifetime. How had time made her feelings swell so much? She glanced at Harry, who walked along as he had done that day at the university, his back straight, his head high, his tie flapping in the breeze from the Thames.

  ‘The thing with the mystery of the supernatural,’ he said, still talking about ghosts and ghouls and the haunted house in The Blue Door, ‘is that if you haven’t ever seen something, it’s tempting to believe that it doesn’t exist.’

  Victoria thought of Harry’s wife, S, with her jagged handwriting in his copy of Great Expectations and her tricks to make Harry marry her all those years ago. She thought of her own mother, blinded by a swollen eye and insisting that she’d walked into a door, and of the thoughts of what might have happened to her that Victoria constantly banished from her mind because she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes and therefore didn’t always have to believe that it had happened.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, as she stared up at the looming face of Big Ben.

  It was after they had been walking for a while, after their steps had fallen into perfect synch with one another, that Harry stopped and looked into the distance.

  ‘Can you wait here for a minute?’ he asked Victoria, squinting over her head at something.

  Victoria nodded, and placed her hand on the railings by the river as Harry disappeared into the crowd of people before them. Late-afternoon sun blazed down onto the crown of her head and she lifted her hand to her burning hair. Minutes passed and Harry didn’t return. He wasn’t visible in the crowd of people, and Victoria’s heart began to flutter in the early stages of panic. He would come back to her, wouldn’t he?

  Fifteen minutes later, Victoria still stood alone, the Thames glinting beside her. If he didn’t come back, perhaps she would throw herself in. She would have to do it quickly, otherwise some tiresome interferer might try to save her, and bring her up, dripping wet and still alone. She squinted into the water, wondering how deep it might be. It would pull her deeper and deeper, cocooning her into a place where she didn’t hurt so much…

  ‘I’m back, Victoria. Queues are bloody eternal here.’

  Victoria spun around to see Harry. ‘I was starting to wonder about throwing myself into the water. I thought you would never come back.’

  Harry stroked Victoria’s hair. ‘How very romantic that you were going to drown rather than live without me.’ He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘But thankfully, that’s not necessary. I only went to the shop over there to buy you something. Here you go.’

  Victoria opened the little paper bag that Harry had given her. Inside was a sepia photograph printed on a postcard.

  ‘It’s Queen Victoria! Oh Harry, I love it.’

  ‘It’s to remind you, whenever I’m not there to do it myself,’ Harry said, as they began to walk again, ‘that you, and only you, are my Queen.’

  A few weeks later, Victoria sniffed as she spritzed Chanel onto her pale wrists. She wanted to smell luxury and femininity, but she could only smell her mother. Still, it was better than nothing.

  She’d agreed to meet Harry outside the university. His car was a red Monza, and when Victoria got in, the smell of Chanel dissipated and she could smell a sort of concentrated version of Harry’s scent instead: ink and coffee and cleverness. They were going to Concetta’s, a new coffee bar in Ashwood that Sally had been talking about lately.

  ‘I hope you like it there,’ Victoria said, as Harry sped out of Silenshore. Ashwood was a much newer, greyer town than Silenshore, about fifteen minutes away in the car. It had more shops and more people and sounds than Victoria was used to, and she preferred it to Silenshore.

  ‘I’m sure I will. We’ll get a good seat and sit all night drinking coffee and talking about books. In fact, that reminds me. I looked at that writing you left with me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought your short stories were quite brilliant. I can tell you’ve been influenced by Robert Bell.’

  ‘Yes, I definitely have. Even more so since his talk.’

  ‘I like the way you describe places and people. You obviously have excellent skills of observation.’

  Victoria stared at Harry. What did she observe about him? A man in his late twenties, his jaw ever so slightly darkened with hair that if she reached out and touched would be softer than it looked.

  ‘Is there anything you think I could do better?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘Nothing comes to mind.’

  ‘Oh, Harry. You’re a teacher! You have to tell me to do something differently. I won’t be offended, I promise. I want to learn.’

  Harry laughed. ‘You’re a rather ideal student. Most want me to think their work is perfection. They want me to tell them to leave their essays exactly as they are, and go out and have fun instead of working.’

  ‘Well, I want to get better. Go on. Tell me.’

  ‘I’ll have a think. I didn’t read your stories as a teacher. I read them as a reader. It’s a different thing.’

  Victoria rested her head back on the seat of the car as they flew towards Ashwood. She wondered if the coffee bar would be crowded. She couldn’t imagine Harry in the ones she’d been to before with Sally, because they had all been full of young people, and Harry was so much more mature and refined than the skinny little boys Victoria used to talk to and dance with. A flicker of excitement fizzed inside her as she thought of being on Harry’s arm, and she hummed as he parked the car.

  ‘Sally said it’s on Wood Street,’ Victoria said as they walked along the wide pavement, past a neat row of new council houses. ‘So it must be just along here.’

  They found Concetta’s straight away, and sat in a dark corner.

  ‘I’ve had an idea,’ Harry said after their frothy coffees had been set down on their table. ‘I don’t want you to change the stories you’ve already written. I want you to write something new.’

  ‘Go on,’ Victoria said.

  ‘Well, I really think you could write something wonderful about the castle. Just a short piece. I could tell you what I know about it, and then you could come up with a sort of biographical story about it. I could see about having it put up in the University foyer, if you’d like.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to write about the castle!’ Victoria put her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her palm. ‘I remember a few things that you told me about it. I remember you saying about the evacuees who were sent there. I thought how wonderful it would be to be sent to such a place to live. If I were sent there, I wouldn’t ever want to go home. It seems magical there, somehow.’

  ‘Some people say it’s magical and some say it’s a place of doom. But that’s what’ll make it so fascinating as a subject.’ Harry took a paper napkin and a pen from his pocket and scribbled down some notes. ‘So, yes, perhaps a bit of history, and a bit of mystery, all in that lovely romantic voice you use in your stories. I don’t know everything about it, but I know that it was built just after the Norman Conquest. The same family owned it, until they disappeared just after the war. That’s when the University took it over.’

  ‘What did you say it was called before the University bought it?’ Victoria asked.

  ‘It was called Castle du Rêve.’

  ‘That’s French, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It is. Roughly translates to Castle of the Dream.’

  ‘That’s what I’ll call my piece of writing,’ Victoria said, pulling the napkin towards her as Harry put his pen back in his pocket. She gazed around her, at the cappuccinos and Pepsi floats, the sticky tables and the bored waitresses that reminded her of Sally, and the boys and the grey streets beyond the window, and all the other things that one day she would leave behind for a life
with Harry. ‘The Castle of Dreams.’

  The hot summer gave way to a drizzling end. Silenshore lay emptier than it ever had before: the sea thrashing alone with nobody to watch it. When Victoria awoke on the second Saturday of the month, she sat up in bed, an unpleasant anxiety flooding through her. She heard her mother in the bathroom, clanking the taps on and off. Victoria swallowed, nausea swimming through her body. She lay back down, but that made it worse. She stared up at the ceiling. Everything she looked at made her feel more sick. She sat up again, clutching her stomach in misery.

  Harry had taken her out last night. They had gone to a bar she hadn’t even known was there, in a town beyond Ashwood that was wide and clean and full of people that Victoria knew she would never see again. He had given her a glass of glittering yellow champagne, and then another, and another, until Victoria’s words blurred into each other and she laughed at everything Harry said, and then laughter blurred into tears and the tears blurred into staggering into her bedroom and falling into bed.

  Now, her clothes were crumpled and stale with the champagne that had slopped over Victoria’s glass. Her mouth tasted of rot. She wondered if she’d said anything she shouldn’t, if she had shown Harry up. The thought of showing him up was what did it: she lurched out of bed, tripping on her discarded shoes on the floor, and vomited into her red leather handbag.

  She threw the handbag away, which was a shame. Her mother had bought it her for Christmas years before, when Victoria had started to take an interest in her mother’s things. She had put a little comb in it, and a bracelet. The bracelet had disappeared over time, as things sometimes do, and the comb had lost most of its teeth when it was used on a doll with particularly stiff hair. But the bag had remained: a reminder that Victoria did have a mother, one who had, at some point, cared about Victoria being happy and had wrapped up a present that she would love in brown paper decorated with hand-drawn stars. As she wrapped the acid-drenched bag in a towel, and dumped it into the bin, covering it carefully with some newspaper, Victoria said a silent farewell.

  No more champagne, she told herself as she trudged into the shop, feeling as though she needed to sit down. The urge to vomit again lingered, and when a man came into the shop who smelt ever so slightly of onions, Victoria had to excuse herself and take some careful, measured breaths behind the back door. She bent over, her hands on her knees, her stomach pulsing to expel anything that was left in it. She stayed in the hallway that led from the shop to the flat until she heard the huff of an impatient sigh from the onion man, and the bang of the front door as he left.

  But although Victoria didn’t have any more champagne that week, although Harry didn’t take her to a restaurant and fill her with rich food, shiny with oil again, every day when Victoria woke, the heavy weight of sickness returned.

  Be careful, darling

  I just don’t want you getting into trouble

  The words stung Victoria’s mind, hot and sharp as needles. She sat in her bed on Wednesday morning, knowing that champagne did not make you sick for five days, knowing that something else did, something that she couldn’t even consider. She held her breath, wanting to keep everything in. Her father dawdled in the pink-tiled bathroom. Her mother lay in bed, her head lolling against the wall that adjoined her bedroom to the bathroom.

  Victoria held her breath for as long as possible, but it was no good. The sickness burst from her. She climbed out of bed weakly and took off her bedsheets, twisting them into a knot and stuffing them into a paper bag. It was lucky that her mother wasn’t very good at housework. Victoria would never have got away with this if she had a normal mother who knew what sheets she’d made the bed up with and might want to know what had happened to them.

  ‘Victoria!’ Jack’s voice vibrated through her bedroom door. ‘Shop, please!’

  Victoria brushed her hair in front of her sapphire hand mirror, which was propped up on her bedside. She thought of Harry, of Sarah, of Sally, of her parents. She thought of the woman across the road who ran Blythe’s Bakery, who had a squirming baby boy, all wrinkles and skin and jerky little movements. She touched her belly, and then was sick again, managing to narrowly avoiding the carpet and aim for her bin.

  ‘Victoria! Shop! Now!’ her father yelled, his heavy footsteps passing her bedroom door.

  She scraped her hair into a high ponytail, pinched her cheeks to give them some colour and then, plastering on the face of a person who hadn’t been sick, who wasn’t fearing for her life, walked slowly down the stairs, and into Lace Antiques.

  ‘You know,’ Sally said as they sat at table six of Clover’s, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray on the table, ‘there’s a rumour that this place is being taken over by somebody new.’

  Victoria stared down at her egg custard. The sickness had faded in the last few weeks, leaving behind a bitter scent on Victoria’s bedroom carpet, and the pleasant feeling that she might have imagined it all. She took up her spoon and dug into the pastry, cutting into it with mean, hard blows. It crumbled, and the custard spurted out messily from the centre. She dipped her finger into the cold yellow jelly and licked it. Perhaps it had been a nasty illness and nothing more. She had heard that the sure sign of a baby was a missed monthly, but to tell the truth, Victoria didn’t have regular ones anyway. They came every now and again like the way distant friends might turn up to stay: unexpected, infrequent but very inconvenient. She couldn’t remember the last one she’d had, so there was no way she knew when her next was due. She spooned up a huge chunk of custard and crammed it into her mouth. Delicious.

  ‘Really? Will you be able to keep your job?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a man called Eric Mayor. He keeps coming in all the time, asking if we do cappuccinos and when we say no, he asks why on earth not? He looks around with a real glint in his eye as though he has big plans, and everyone says he’s going to buy it.’

  Victoria frowned and glanced down at the mess of custard in front of her. The overpowering aroma of sugar and nutmeg drifted up from the plate, suddenly making her feel sick again.

  ‘I’m sure if he does buy Clover’s, he’ll keep you on. He’d be a fool not to,’ she said, pushing away her plate. This couldn’t be happening.

  There was a pause as Sally put her cigarette in her mouth and took a long drag, staring out stonily over the crowded café. ‘I don’t even like cappuccino,’ she muttered, grey clouds puffing from her lips as she spoke.

  ‘Sally,’ Victoria blurted out, suddenly sure that if she told her friend her worries, they could somehow be sorted out. Sally knew about these things, didn’t she? She would know just what to do.

  ‘Yes?’

  Victoria stalled, knowing that if she said anything now, then it would be real and she would sob, and everyone would look at them and wonder what had happened. So she said nothing. But in the end, Sally brought it up.

  ‘I need cheering up. I need to hear something exciting. Tell me about Harry! Has he kissed you again? Is he still as handsome as you first thought?’

  Victoria shuffled in her seat and nodded. ‘Yes. He’s kissed me again. And he’s so handsome, I don’t quite know what to do about it.’

  Sally laughed. ‘There’s not much you can do. Victoria,’ she said, her voice turning serious all of a sudden. ‘You do know…you know about getting caught, don’t you? You know how it happens?’

  Victoria flinched. A memory flickered into her mind. Her mother, sighing when they heard about some girl who’d had a baby without getting married. She got caught too early. Make sure you know, Victoria. There had been no elaboration when her mother had said this years ago, just the sting of the words and the dull ache of confusion about what they might mean. Now, their meaning grew inside Victoria each day.

  ‘Of course I know,’ Victoria said, taking the cigarette from Sally and sucking on it so quickly that she felt quite dizzy. She couldn’t say anything else. The words slipped out all on their own.

  Sally nodded curtly, then looked around
her before whispering. ‘You know, I heard that Barbara Reynolds managed to go to a doctor outside of Silenshore, and told this new doctor that she was married. She wore a Woolworth’s wedding ring. The doctor believed her, because why wouldn’t he, and gave Barbara all kinds of information on artificial checks.’

  ‘Sally, don’t compare me to Barbara Reynolds. I’m nothing like her. I love Harry. I think he loves me too.’

  Sally looked at Victoria shrewdly and snatched her cigarette back. ‘I’m not comparing you to anybody. I just don’t want you getting into trouble.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Victoria said, sitting back in her chair and wondering when Sally’s break might be over.

  And so that was it. She couldn’t tell Harry, of course. She couldn’t even go through with telling Sally. The idea of a baby was like poisonous lead, weighing her body down everywhere she went. The sickness came and went, and after each day looking after the shop, Victoria began to go straight to bed, where she would lie quite still until the next morning, when the nightmare would start all over again. Day after day, night after night, she wondered and worried: what was going to become of her?

  Chapter 13

  Isobel: 2011

  My Queen,

  I don’t know why I still write. I’ve never had a reply, but perhaps my soul is somehow carrying my thoughts to you. Do you believe in souls? This very question reminds me that there is so much more I want to ask you. Have you read the new Robert Bell book? Have you been to London? Have you worn the green dress that I bought you? Do you think you might risk shame and live with a man who is married only in name? Do you think you can only truly love one person? Do you believe in spells and dreams coming true? Who might have told me to leave Silenshore? And why?

  Write to me, answer me.

  I’m still being followed.