The Girl at the Window

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Will …’ I pull him into the crook of my arm. ‘This is so hard, so much harder for you, and I keep forgetting that. This place was my whole life when I was your age, and I suppose I thought you’d see it the way that I did. When I think about it, the way you must see it, then I suppose it might seem a bit lonely out here, a bit scary but—’

  ‘It’s not Ponden,’ Will says. ‘I like Ponden. It’s everything outside I don’t like.’

  ‘I know you miss your friends, and your bed, and everything you knew. So do I, darling.’

  ‘I miss Daddy.’ Will looks at me. ‘I miss Daddy and I don’t want to do anything new until he comes back. I don’t want him to think that we were just getting used to life without him, Mummy; that will make him sad. So can I just not do anything else new, Mummy, please? Please? I’ll read books, lots of books, and eat salad and tidy up, I promise. Please let me stay with you.’

  ‘Darling, there is honestly nothing more I would like than for it to be just me and you, every day. I want to stay still too, but – but we can’t, Will. We have to do the things that we would always do; we have to be brave and keep going, keep trying, until it doesn’t feel like trying any more.’

  ‘So I have to go to school?’ Will seems to shrink in my arms and I hold him even closer.

  ‘I tell you what; will you just see what it’s like?’ I ask him. ‘Daddy would want you to see what it was like, wouldn’t he? Like he always said, if you don’t climb the mountain or get in a rocket to the moon, you’ll never know what it’s like to be on top of the mountain or walking on the moon.’

  ‘But Daddy isn’t here yet …’ Will’s voice is very small, very quiet.

  ‘He is,’ I say. ‘He’s always with us. When I look at you, I can see him. His heart and courage, that smile that made everyone fall for him. I can see him in you. When I look at you, you give me courage.’

  Will looks at me. ‘Are you scared, Mummy?’

  ‘A little bit,’ I say.

  ‘Of the bad things outside?’

  It’s such a strange thing to say that I laugh a little.

  ‘No. I’m scared of always feeling so sad inside, of missing Daddy so much that I don’t see and feel all the things that are still good, like you.’

  ‘I’ll go to school tomorrow,’ Will says. ‘I’ll see what it’s like.’

  ‘You’re a good boy,’ I tell him. ‘And tomorrow the sun will be out and everything will seem better. I expect falling out of the tree took it out of you a bit, and I don’t blame you.’

  Will turns towards me a little so that I can see one eye.

  ‘I didn’t fall out of the tree,’ he whispers, as if he’s worried about being overheard. ‘I was pushed. The bad one pushed me.’

  Ponden 1655

  Dear Lord our Saviour, please forgive my sins, for I have committed theft. This night, while Casson was drinking with his cronies, I crept into his study and took sheets of paper, and more ink. Lord God, I had to do it, for otherwise none will ever know of the horrors done by this man, for there is only Robert and I to record them. My letters improve daily, and I burn with such a longing to form every thought on paper that I cannot contain myself, even if it is the Devil that tempts me. Dear God, forgive me and keep me safe from evil, but how can knowledge be a sin, Lord, if my heart and intentions are pure?

  Every day Casson seeks to push Robert out of his own home, and take what is his. But I shall make a record here of the crimes I know that he has committed and when the time comes, I shall present them to the justice, even though it may be my life is forfeit, for there were times when I was his accomplice.

  For though I am but a female, and lowly born, I am no coward. Nor will I stand by and see another life ruined by he that ruined mine. My soul burns in fury at the injustice he metes out on good people, and I will not let him have peace as long as I am strong enough to stand on my two feet.

  Often, Robert sits in the old Porter’s chair in the hall, hiding in the shadow of the hood, and listens to what Casson has to say. The more ale that passes his lips, the looser they become. When I am able, I crawl in next to him and we listen together, twined up like a brace of grouse.

  This very evening, parading his infant as if it were a prize animal, we heard Casson say, ‘We don’t need more hungry mouths, now I have a babe to feed. We don’t need more dead weight, and it’s time that boy made his own way in the world. Or any way, as long as it is far from here.’

  And there was much laughing and shouts of agreement, for the men that Casson calls his friends are all in his employ and they know who to grovel to.

  I held Robert’s hand, and sought out his gaze and saw such sadness and anger there, and I feared he would do something that would get him beat.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ I said to him.

  Robert replied, ‘If Ma dies that bastard would see me soon dispatched after her.’ He peered into the hall, where the baby still shrieked, and the men still laughed.

  ‘Perhaps he will let the babe fall,’ I said. May God forgive me, but Robert is a much purer and more devout soul than mine.

  ‘Tis not the baby’s fault the father is a demon,’ he said.

  I spoke to him of my greatest fear, that soon I will be made to leave Ponden Hall. How I’d dreamed that I was lost in paradise, as green and as beautiful as Eden, and how I had been cast out into a great churning river to drown, red-painted demon faces watching me as I was lost in the fierce brown water. I draw the face here, or a little like it, at least.

  Robert held me very close and very firm to his bosom and said to me, ‘Ponden Hall is your home and so it always shall be. I say it is, and I am this house’s master. I shall never let you leave me, Agnes, for if you do, all hope will die.’

  Never have I felt at once so happy and so full of fear, afraid of what thoughts and desires stirred in my heart, pray forgive me Dear Lord our Saviour. And Robert spoke once again, his eyes fixed on mine so that I would know each word was a vow.

  ‘I would die for you, Agnes.’

  ‘And I’d kill for you, Robert.’

  No more words were spoken, no more were needed. When Robert left me at last, I stole this paper and ink and I do not feel sorry for it, for there are now so many words in my head that I could fill a library with everything I wish to express.

  Agnes, aged 12 or thereabouts

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Night falls, and I wait for Ponden to quiet, for Ma’s radio to stop blaring, and Will’s breaths to steady and deepen.

  Tonight, as I kissed his forehead a gentle goodnight, Mab crept up the stairs, and positioned herself across the door with a groan. The first time she’s ever done this since we arrived. It could be that she and Will had bonded more, or that she senses he’s anxious about tomorrow.

  ‘What do you know, Mab?’ I asked her and her amber eyes regarded me solemnly. ‘I’d love to know what you know, but you’ll keep an eye on him, won’t you?’

  She settled her great head onto her paws, her eyes still fixed on mine as I pushed the door to a close, and I took that as a yes.

  Will said he was pushed out of that tree. He was adamant about it, though when I tried to get him to tell me who or what the ‘bad one’ is, he clammed up, refusing even to look at me.

  And yet there wasn’t anyone else in the garden; I know that for sure, because I would have seen them. There was no one in the lane, or anywhere. But when I went over it all with him, he insisted that he was forcibly dislodged. He felt a hand shove him in the small of his back, he said.

  So I went out to look at the tree, just before it got dark. The afternoon absence of sunlight had left a metallic-hard chill in the air and the garden was quiet, even of birdsong, just the sound and suck of the damp ground underfoot.

  The branches of the tree were covered in moss, every inch of trunk and branch furred with a deep green, as often so much of this landscape is perpetually steeped in water, whether it rises from below or falls from above. After a deluge of rain in the morning
it would have been slippery to stand on and a firm gust of wind might have felt like a shove.

  But he was so sure, so very sure that he was pushed and tonight is the night that Mab’s decided to take up the position of sentinel outside his room.

  Now, taking the box file out of the bookcase, I tuck it under my arm, opening the bedroom door. Mab looks up at me and then into the room where Will is sleeping.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I say, and at once she goes inside and clambers up onto the bed, curling herself into the concave space made by his sleeping form, and I’m reassured as I see his arm curl around her middle. It’s good to know that she is there, keeping watch over him, an elderly guardian angel, and I know that no other creature could be as diligent and loyal as her.

  For a moment I listen at the top of the stairs, for any sounds of life downstairs. There is nothing but the creaking of old timbers, and the rush of the air over rickety roof tiles. Walking into Cathy’s room, I cross over to the window to take one last look at the tree Will was climbing when he fell. I can barely see it now, just a dark web of branches reaching into the sky.

  When I was little, Dad had told me about the Ponden Child, never seen but often heard, which sounded like a very small child crying and scratching at the windows as if it were trying to get in.

  ‘No one knows the name of the poor soul,’ Dad had explained. ‘Just the sound of a poor lost child crying for its mother, scratching to come in.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it,’ I’d said, my eyes fixing just above his shoulder.

  ‘So,’ Dad had said then, ‘tell me about your friend, the girl who you play with up here sometimes.’

  And that’s when it comes back to me, that’s what I was trying to remember when I found Will laughing and talking in an empty room. I’d had an imaginary friend myself once.

  It comes flooding back now, how I’d spend hours in my room, playing with the dollhouse, talking to her, laughing, listening as she told me stories. It hadn’t been until Dad asked me that question that I realised the girl might not be real.

  ‘It’s just a game,’ I’d said to Dad, noticing her standing in the corner of the room, waiting for him to leave. ‘I just made her up, Daddy.’

  ‘OK.’ Dad had looked relieved as he’d smoothed the hair back from my face and kissed me, just as tonight I had kissed Will in that same room, in that same bed. ‘Don’t make friends with the dead, lass,’ he’d told me. ‘Don’t want them to get so attached to you they want you with them always.’

  Sixteen years apart from here and I’d forgotten how much Dad had talked about ghosts as if they were as commonplace as clouds, but that was often the way around here: talk of the Gytrash and the barghest as if they were as real as the sheep in the fields, and the story that the fairy folk only left when the industrial revolution moved in. Long enough ago to be a fairy tale, but recent enough for a glimmer of those old ways to still flicker just within living memory, passed down from child to child. You grow up and all the magic seeps away, that’s how I always saw it, but not Dad. Dad believed in magic until the day he died.

  So, it’s with him in mind that I turn around, searching every corner of the empty room.

  ‘Is there anyone here?’ I ask out loud, and I am surprised at how my gut contracts. I hold my breath as my skin prickles and bumps, but there is no reply. No bump in the night, no ghostly sigh. There is nothing but that which there always is here: centuries of existence. And now that I am alone at last, I have a chance to look at a little bit of the mosaic that I discovered yesterday, and see if it really could be what I hope it is.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At last I can let the contents of this box occupy my head once again, although there is a part of me that doesn’t want to open it, that doesn’t want to discover that, on closer examination, it was a trick of the light that made me believe what I saw might change literary history for good.

  My hands are trembling; I feel the reverberation in my fingers as I carefully set out everything I need. It’s only been a few weeks since I left the museum for good, but I’ve missed it, this feeling of anticipation as I bring a little piece of history to light.

  Since Abe was lost there has never been any room in my head for anything except getting from day to day, somehow. Not until this secret, waiting here always throughout the whole of my life, just for me.

  Is it wrong to feel such joy that it is mine, my discovery? Because yes, it belongs to the house, but then again, so do I. So this is mine, and I am Ponden’s. And this is mine.

  Once again, I carefully unfurl the papers, laying them side by side, and simply allow myself to see, before I really look. For, whoever wrote these words, here is evidence of someone long gone, someone who breathed and loved and laughed and wept, and whatever these papers contain, even if it’s mundane, that is thrill enough for me.

  That connection, that stretching back, one hand to another, life to life, age to age, linked only with memory and objects, and sometimes, very rarely, both.

  What I’m looking at has always been meant for me. And it is a conviction so strange and yet so strong that no amount of sensible thinking will chase it away. Still I hold back from looking, from reading, from knowing, until I have everything ready.

  Although we have the power back on, there is still no phone signal or Wi-Fi at Ponden, so I return to my books and biographies, opening the pages at the illustrations of the few surviving diary papers of Emily Brontë, her letters and sketches, the reproductions of which are not nearly as good quality as they should be to make a comparison, but for the moment they are all I have to go by. I look at the chaotic, sprawling hand as it races down the paper, framing a sketch of a thin and pitiful-looking girl, and then speeds around the corner at the edge of the paper, at a forty-five degree angle, the letters becoming ever smaller and more illegible.

  It looks like something Emily might have written; it looks like her hurried, impatient hand. It looks just like it. Still, it could be a prank, a tribute. If I’d thought of this when I was twelve or thirteen, I definitely would have made my own Emily Brontë diary papers and hidden them in the room she used to read in.

  The moment of truth: I position my lamp right over the paper, hold the magnifying glass over it, and begin to read. And the moment I do, a voice as clear as a striking bell leaps into my mind.

  August 1848

  Charlotte and Anne are at home and I have come to Ponden alone. It took me an age to get Robert to leave me be to read, for he always wishes me to talk to him about nothing of consequence, as if I have any care for his poor efforts at poetry and drawing. He is a good friend, and gentle. Even so, I’d wish him much less present when I come to Ponden to read. Eventually I scowled and ignored him away and was left alone at last, which is when I came across these three diary papers, dated almost two hundred years since, found within the pages of Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes and Workes. A book which, in itself more than two hundred years old, lends credence to the dates of the papers.

  I do believe that none have laid eyes on them for centuries. There will be more, because I hear her, the girl who wrote this. If I listen very carefully, I can hear her voice in the creak of the boards or the breath of the wind. There are a thousand books in the library at Ponden, and many of them have only been opened by me, these last several years or more, so I will search them all for more of her words, mindful that they must be dated before 1660. For here is a story waiting to be told. EJB 1848

  It’s her! I feel it in my bones: I know it. I’ve read every one of the few words left behind in her own hand, and I recognise it. I look around the quiet room, as if there might be someone here to share the news with and, in the middle of this disbelief, this joy, how I long to run and find Abe and tell him what I’ve discovered. I can see how he would smile, how his eyes would light up. This grief, this joy entwined in one moment of certainty. This handwriting belongs to Emily Brontë, I’m sure of it. Of course, I need to take it to the experts, to the Parsonage, but I know that it is
her and I found it. I found a piece of her that no one else has ever seen, and this might be the most remarkable moment of my professional life, the most triumphant and important moment of my career. Slowly, I right myself, and read it again, tears and smiles all silent, and I long to touch it with my bare hands, but I don’t. Instead, I move the light across to the other three sheets of paper that Emily felt so entranced by, and some need to handle them makes me pick one up, as fragile as it is. I hold it in my ungloved hands, feeling the brush of the thick, aged paper and I wonder who touched it first, who touched it last.

  It’s feather-light, but heavy with memory and touch, saturated with DNA and being. It’s one moment in time unfurling into another, colliding history into the present and making them one. It’s beautiful.

  The handwriting is archaic but clear, the paper covered not only in words but drawings, one image repeated again and again, a fearsome-looking face, half of it shaded dark, the twist of something that could be a vine or a wreath, or a river she has dreamed about or simply a seventeenth-century doodle that borders the page. And there is one word, written so heavily that the ink has blotted on the page, and underscored with several slashes of the nib that have cut right through the paper. The blood thickens in my veins as I read, for I see here a name that has haunted the Heatons for centuries, a name that still makes us pause and throw salt over our shoulder.

  Henry Casson

  The bulb over my head flickers and blinks out.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I sit very still in the dark, the room moving and whispering around me; I breathed in the second the light went out, and have yet to breathe out. Outside the window the moon is bright, and distant car headlights track across the wall behind me. I am suddenly intensely alert, each sense tuned to every molecule in the air; to taste, sound, movement.

  There is a creak of a board at my back, and yes, the sound of a long breath, a sigh that I feel finish on the back of my neck.