‘What do you think you’re doing here, loser?’ she asks icily.
Mum turns round sharply from the Aga. ‘Honey!’ she says. ‘Whatever you might think of Shay, that’s no way to talk to a guest!’
Honey doesn’t seem to hear. The rest of us stand there awkwardly.
‘It’s OK, Charlotte,’ Shay says to Mum. ‘I’m sorry. Looks like I misjudged things. I thought it was time we buried the hatchet …’
Honey laughs, and I am pretty sure that if there was a hatchet anywhere around right now, she would know exactly where to bury it.
‘I didn’t think you were going to this party, Honey!’ Mum says, trying to steer the conversation on to safer ground.
‘As if,’ Honey snarls. ‘I’m going into town with Alex.’
‘Alex?’ Mum echoes, but Honey ignores the question.
She glances at Cherry, whose witch costume is a black T-shirt, miniskirt and stripy tights, with toy spiders in her hair and a broomstick she made herself from birch twigs tied on to a twisty branch.
Honey raises an eyebrow.
‘Aren’t you supposed to dress up?’ she says nastily, and Cherry’s cheeks flood with pink.
Then there’s the roar of a motorbike on the gravel outside and my big sister runs out into the darkness.
‘Hang on a minute!’ Paddy calls after her, but she slams the door in his face. We hear the motorbike roar away, and then silence.
‘Who is this Alex boy?’ Mum asks. ‘How old is he, anyway?’
‘Old enough to have a motorbike,’ Paddy frowns.
‘Honey’s fourteen!’ Mum wails. ‘Just a child! And we’ve let her ride off into the night on a motorbike, with a boy we’ve never met!’
‘You couldn’t have stopped her, Mum,’ I say.
That’s Honey … you can’t stop her. She used to be the coolest sister in the world, but now she is way out of reach, an alien creature in too much black mascara and lipgloss, with a never-ending line-up of scary boyfriends. She’s off the rails – and there’s nothing at all we can do about it.
3
The evening goes downhill from there.
Millie and Tia are waiting for us outside the hall. We’ve been best friends since we were little kids … Tia and Summer, and Millie and me. One look at their faces tells me that the party, as Honey predicted, is lame. There are lots of little kids ducking for apples and mums sipping blood-red punch that is really just cranberry juice. There are biscuits with green icing shaped like severed fingers and the tray of toffee apples we carried down from Mum. There are cool pumpkin lanterns that flicker and glint, but still, we are the oldest kids there by a mile. We slope off early to trick-or-treat around the village, and manage to collect a plastic cauldron full of toffee and peanuts and weird gummy sweets that look like eyeballs.
Maybe I am getting too old for Halloween after all, because I am sick of cheesy, spooky jokes and I have eaten so many sweets I think my teeth might dissolve. ‘This is no fun,’ Summer declares, reading my mind. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘It’s only half eight!’ Coco argues. ‘And it’s Halloween!’
‘We can’t go home yet,’ Millie groans.
‘Why don’t you all come back to the caravan?’ Cherry suggests. ‘Paddy said he’d light the stove, so it should be warm, and I have Irn-Bru … we could tell ghost stories!’
Coco’s eyes light up. ‘Oh, let’s! That’d be cool!’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I say.
We are walking up past the church when Cherry stops and frowns, looking around anxiously. ‘Did you hear something?’ she asks. ‘Like … well, ghostly footsteps?’
‘Ghosts don’t have footsteps!’ Coco says. ‘They just glide right through you, like a cold finger sliding down your spine!’
‘There’s nothing there, Cherry,’ Shay promises.
We move on, but seconds later a tall, grey-skinned zombie, trailing lengths of bloodstained bandages, leaps out from behind a gravestone, wild-eyed and moaning, right in front of us.
I take a closer look and sigh, exasperated. Alfie Anderson is possibly the most annoying boy at Exmoor Park Middle School, and practical jokes are his speciality. Bad practical jokes. I have known him since the first day of primary school, and he has not improved with age.
‘Alfie, what are you playing at?’ Summer asks. ‘You just about gave me heart failure. It’s OK, Cherry – he’s harmless. Meet the village nutter.’
‘Hey,’ Alfie says, raising an eyebrow. ‘It was just a joke.’
‘Jokes are supposed to be funny,’ Summer says. She hooks an arm into Cherry’s and marches away along the lane with Millie, Tia, Shay and Coco following. I am left with Alfie, his shoulders drooping.
‘Where are you all going?’ he asks. ‘What about the party?’
‘We’ve been, and it wasn’t very good. We’re heading home to tell ghost stories,’ I say, and Alfie’s face lights up.
‘I know lots of those! Really bloodthirsty ones. Can I come?’
I hesitate. Summer finds Alfie deeply annoying, and so do I except in very small doses, but it seems really mean to say no.
‘Er … well …’
But Alfie is striding on ahead. ‘I love ghost stories. Ghouls, zombies, axe-wielding maniacs … awesome stuff.’
I roll my eyes and head off after Alfie and the others, out of the village and along the quiet lane that leads up to Tanglewood House. Ancient trees dip down, whispering, over the hedgerows and a barn owl hoots eerily and swoops down low above us with a flash of white wings.
‘A ghost!’ Coco yelps, thrilled.
‘An owl,’ I say. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts, you know that!’
‘There might be,’ she argues. ‘It’s Halloween! I read about it – it’s the one night of the year when the veil between the world of the living and the dead lifts a little –’
‘Woo-hoo-hoo!’ Alfie Anderson yells. And he clowns around all the way up the lane, across the gravel drive at Tanglewood and down to the gypsy caravan.
When Cherry first arrived, she and Honey had to share a room – that lasted about five minutes because Honey was weird about Cherry from the start, even before the whole Shay-disaster. Cherry has been camped out in the caravan ever since. It’s beautiful, a real traveller wagon, carefully restored and parked under the trees. Even so, Cherry would rather be in the house with us, I think. And although there are no spare rooms in the main bit of the house, because Tanglewood House is a B&B, Paddy has promised to clear out the attic so that Cherry can have a little room of her own by Christmas.
We pile into the caravan, shoe-horning ourselves in, the little woodburner roaring. It might be a world record for the most people to fit inside a gypsy caravan, but it’s fun. Cherry pours Irn-Bru into tin mugs and we pass round the trick-or-treat sweets just in case there is any danger of our blood sugar levels dipping down towards normal.
The ghost stories begin. Alfie tells an especially gruesome one about a headless horseman, Shay tells us about the shipwrecked smugglers who supposedly haunt the coast, and Cherry shares a beautiful Japanese tale that may or may not be based on her mum, who died when she was a toddler.
‘Are there any stories about Tanglewood?’ Shay wants to know.
‘Sure,’ Summer says. ‘Grandma Kate used to tell us lots of stories about the place …’
‘Stories?’ Cherry prompts.
‘This house has been in the family for years,’ I say. ‘And Grandma Kate knew all the stories. One of them was kind of spooky …’
‘Oh, about Clara?’ Coco exclaims. ‘I love that one. It’s so, so sad!’
Alfie scrunches up his face. ‘Can’t we have gory, instead?’
‘Quiet, Alfie,’ Summer huffs. ‘It’s a love story, about a girl who fell for the wrong boy …’
Cherry glances at Shay, and I remember that she has fallen for the ‘wrong’ boy too, at least as far as Honey is concerned.
‘Clara Travers lived here, at Tanglewood, back in the 192
0s,’ Summer begins. ‘She was a relative of Grandma Kate’s from way back. She was seventeen, and engaged to be married to an older man, with a big house in London …’
I pick up the story where Summer leaves off. ‘Clara’s fiancé was rich, and her parents thought the match was a good one,’ I continue. ‘But she didn’t love him. She fell for a gypsy boy, one of the Romany travellers who sometimes camped in the woods nearby. They planned to run away together, but Clara’s parents found out. Her father was furious … He chased the travellers away and told them never to return.’
Cherry bites her lip. ‘That’s sooo sad!’
‘That’s not the end,’ Coco says, wide-eyed. ‘Tell her, Skye!’
I take a deep breath. ‘When Clara saw that the travellers had gone, she was heartbroken,’ I say. ‘The day before she was due to marry her fiancé, she left her clothes folded in a little pile on the beach and swam out into the ocean. She was never seen again.’
‘Her ghost is supposed to wander the woods,’ Coco declares. ‘Crying and looking for her lost love … that’s what Grandma Kate used to say!’
‘Oh!’ Millie says. ‘Spooky!’
‘It’s a sad story,’ I shrug. ‘But there is no ghost, obviously … we’ve been looking for years, and we’ve never seen a single thing.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything, though,’ Coco says. ‘She could be here right now, listening …’
A silence falls, and into the silence comes a rustling of leaves overhead and the soft hooting of the barn owl. It’s probably a sugar rush from way too many sweets, but my heart begins to race.
‘Boo!’ Alfie yells, and the moment is lost. Everyone is talking again, too fast, too loud. Tia texts her mum to arrange a lift home for her and Millie, and when the car arrives Shay and Alfie grab a lift too. The rest of us head back up to the house, bursting into the warm, bright kitchen in a muddle of laughter and chat.
Paddy and Mum look up at us, startled, their faces smudged with dust. A huddle of cardboard boxes sit in the corner of the kitchen, piled up with junk and stuff I’ve never seen before. A birdcage made of powder-blue wire arranged in ornate twists perches on top of one box, and up on the kitchen table is an old pine trunk, the curving lid pulled back to reveal layers of tissue paper and fabric and what might be a battered leather violin case.
‘What is all this?’ I ask. My heart is racing again, my mouth dry.
Paddy flicks a cobweb from his hair. ‘We thought we’d make a start on clearing that attic space for Cherry’s bedroom,’ he explains. ‘We’ve filled the van with stuff for the tip and dragged a load of boxes out to the workshop to be sorted, but right in the far corner we found this trunk …’
The kitchen is suddenly silent as two ghost girls, a witch and a green-faced monster crowd round to look. I reach out to touch the crumpled tissue paper, and my fingertips brush soft velvet, crisp cotton lace.
‘This stuff looks really old!’ I whisper.
Mum picks up a slim bundle of letters, all tied up together with ribbon, from the top of the trunk.
‘It is old,’ she says. ‘Girls, I don’t suppose you remember that old story your gran used to tell? A sad story, about a girl called Clara Travers? As far as we can see from the letters, these were Clara’s things …’
A shiver runs down my spine.
Ten minutes ago we were huddled in the caravan telling long-ago ghost stories of a girl called Clara. Now all her things are right here, spread out before us in the warm glow of the kitchen. Letters, violins, velvet – these are echoes of a past that we can only guess at, of a future that ended abruptly in the cold, dark ocean.
Forget Alfie Anderson’s graveyard prank – this is easily the spookiest thing that has happened all night.
4
The next day, Summer has a ballet class after school and Coco, Cherry and I are in the kitchen, ploughing through homework while Mum makes marshmallow cupcakes. Marshmallow has always been my favourite taste in the world, although Summer has never been keen.
‘It’s so boring,’ she used to say, wrinkling up her nose. ‘So plain. Sweet but nothingy.’
I’ve always had this horrible feeling that she thinks I’m boring and plain and nothingy too, for liking it.
But to me marshmallow isn’t boring at all. It is soft and sweet and fluffy, a little piece of heaven.
I spot the old pine trunk, still sitting in a corner, and like last night, the tiniest shiver runs down my spine. I’m not sure whether it comes from fear or excitement.
‘Mum?’ I ask, as she sets the cupcakes on a rack to cool, ‘I was wondering … what are you actually going to do with the trunk from the attic?’
Mum frowns. ‘Well, I don’t know … all that stuff is probably worth quite a bit to an antiques dealer. And we could really use the money right now. It’ll be Christmas in a couple of months.’
‘No!’ I protest. ‘Don’t sell them!’
I don’t know why, but the thought of Clara’s things being sold feels wrong.
Mum frowns. ‘But we haven’t got anywhere to put them – Paddy’s about to clear out the attic, so we’d just end up having to store them in the workshop … Although Summer did take the blue birdcage at breakfast time – said she was going to put a plant in it. Would any of the rest of you like something from the trunk?’
‘Me!’ Coco pipes up. ‘The violin! I have always wanted one, and Paddy said he’d teach me if I had something to practise on.’
‘Is that a good idea?’ Mum asks. ‘Coco, you are totally gorgeous and wonderful and talented, but I am not certain that music is your strong point! Remember the time you tried to learn the recorder for that Christmas carol concert back in Year Three?’
Coco may not, but I do. She drove us all crazy, until one day the recorder went mysteriously missing and was never seen again.
‘Shame,’ Honey had said at the time, ruffling Coco’s hair. ‘It seems to have vanished into thin air!’
I think it may actually have vanished into the dustbin, with a little help from Honey, but all of us breathed a huge sigh of relief. Coco had to play the cowbells instead, and even then she couldn’t keep to the beat.
‘This will be different,’ Coco insists now. ‘Paddy will teach me. Properly. Please?’
‘I suppose,’ Mum says doubtfully, licking a curl of vanilla frosting from her fingertip and dotting golden-brown toasted mini marshmallows across the freshly iced cakes. Coco dives into the trunk and rescues the battered leather case, opening it up to reveal a glossy golden violin. She lifts it to her shoulder and saws the bow across it, and a sound like several cats being strangled fills the kitchen.
‘Ouch,’ Coco says. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks …’
Mum offers the plate of still-warm cupcakes around, and I take one eagerly, biting into melting marshmallow sprinkles.
‘What about you, Cherry? Is there anything you’d like from the trunk?’
‘Not really,’ Cherry says. ‘It’s awesome, but … well, it’s just a bit too spooky for me.’
‘OK, Skye, so if you don’t want me to sell it, do you want anything from the trunk? The dresses, maybe?’
I blink. ‘No way … those dresses … could I really have them?’
‘Why not?’ Mum says. ‘You love vintage clothes, don’t you? I think Clara would have wanted you to have them.’
Half an hour later, the pine trunk is sitting next to my bed in the room Summer and I share. I lift the lid and push aside the crumpled tissue paper. For a moment I breathe in the faintest scent of marshmallow, a heady mixture of warm vanilla and sugar. Then it’s gone, replaced by the whiff of dust and age and sadness. Was it the aroma of Mum’s cupcakes, drifting up from the kitchen, or the remnants of some long-ago perfume? Although I’m not sure the scent would last all that time. It’s probably just my imagination.
Last night, the whole idea of Clara’s trunk was so spooky I didn’t look too carefully at what was inside … but it’s like treasure.
The t
runk is filled with jewel-bright velvet shift dresses and petticoats made of white cotton lace. There are crinkled leather shoes with little heels, straw hats and cloche hats, and white gloves of soft suede. There is a feathered headband and silver bracelets tarnished dark with age, a beaded clutch bag, and folded carefully, right at the bottom, a soft woollen coat the colour of emeralds, lined with green satin.
I slip the coat on, button it up, let the skirt spin out around me. This coat is soft and warm and barely worn at all, a million times better than my usual jumble-sale finds. Everything in the trunk is perfect, as though it were put away just yesterday and not ninety years ago.
I try on the white cotton petticoats, the velvet shift dresses, one at a time … midnight blue, moss green, crimson. Clara Travers must have been small and slender because the clothes seem to fit. I don’t look like a child wearing adult clothes, not at all. A while ago I read a book about the 1920s, all jazz records and flapper girls. I pull on a cloche hat, peer out from under the rim, grinning, looking in the mirror for traces of a flapper girl from long ago.
Judging by the cool clothes, I am pretty certain that Clara Travers liked to dance, that she listened to jazz music and learned the Charleston and had a dozen young men queuing up to dance with her in her bright flapper dresses and feathered headband. She was a cool girl, a party girl, I know it. Wearing these clothes, I suddenly feel a bit that way too … brave, beautiful, grown-up.
Then I remember Grandma Kate’s story – that Clara was engaged to be married to a man much older than herself, and my smile fades.
Who was Clara Travers? I wonder to myself. A rich girl with a trunkful of velvet dresses, an armful of bangles, a head filled with dreams? She was seventeen, just three years older than Honey is now. That seems way too young to be tied down to a man she didn’t love. I try to imagine Honey being paired off with some old bloke of thirty or forty, and shudder. It must have felt like the end of everything.
Was there ever a romance, or was it just an alliance made for money, security, status? Did Clara’s parents arrange it all? And how did a girl like Clara fall in love with a gypsy, so much in love she couldn’t see a future without him?
2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye Page 2
