Fiona

by Meredith Moore

  I shake the memory off. “How about you take me on a tour of this place after lunch? I’d like to start learning my way around.”

  “Have one of the other servants do it,” she mutters, pushing her nearly empty plate away from her.

  “I want you to do it,” I say firmly, my tone permitting no arguments.

  Again she rolls her eyes, her favorite reaction, but then stands up. “Fine.”

  She takes me on a whirlwind tour of the castle, through various guest bedrooms, the study where I bumped into Alice—a room filled with books and maps that used to be her father’s and is now her brother’s—the library with the grand piano, and other sitting rooms and parlors that I’ll probably never be able to find again.

  The core of the house is the square tower that was built in the early fourteenth century, Poppy tells me, when the first lord got his title. There are low doorways and half staircases leading to the other wings that were added by later generations, all jumbled together to create one rambling castle.

  Next Poppy shows me the room that she says is the most important one in the castle, located directly underneath the medieval tower. She grabs an electric lantern from a shelf at the top of a tight spiral staircase before we inch down stones too shallow for my feet. I grasp the thick rope that serves as a bannister so hard that I’ll probably get rope burn.

  We enter a dark space, lit only by Poppy’s lantern. There’s nothing in the cavern but a spindly pole in the middle, and I look around, wondering what I’m missing.

  “Mabs would be so mad if she saw you right now,” Poppy says with a smirk.

  Mabs? She calls Mabel Mabs? I almost laugh out loud at the nickname. At the idea that that stern, unpleasant woman would have a nickname at all.

  “Don’t you see what it is?” Poppy asks.

  I look back at the pole and step toward it, realizing that it isn’t a pole at all but the trunk of a tree. It curves a bit, this way and that, as it reaches from the ground up to the roof, where it ends abruptly.

  “Why is there a tree in here?” I ask.

  “The legend is that, when the first lord was exploring his new lands, he grew tired and fell asleep under this holly tree. He had a dream that he should build a castle here, and so he did, right around the tree. It’s supposedly brought good luck to the family ever since.”

  I reach out to touch the smooth, knotted bark, but then pull my hand back after a moment. There’s some strange feeling coursing through me, something I’m catching from the thick air of the room. It feels alive somehow. Crackling with energy, power. And watching me.

  I shake my head, trying to jolt myself out of my sudden panic. What’s the matter with me? It’s just an old tree trunk, and I’m a bit dizzy from that staircase, that’s all. I’m fine. I straighten my shoulders and take a deep breath. Fine.

  “So why would Mabel be mad at me for not knowing what it was?” I ask, trying to sound normal.

  Poppy circles the tree in front of me, swinging the lantern in her hand, creating strange shadows on the wall. “Because she’s obsessed with it. She always says we’re a lucky family, blessed because of the tree. Anything from surviving a battle to getting a good grade on a test is due to this tree, according to her. It’s like she worships it or something.”

  I wouldn’t have suspected grim, dour Mabel to have such an impractical belief, but then again, there’s something about this centuries-old tree trunk in the middle of this night-dark room . . . some unsettling feeling it gives off.

  Poppy moves toward the staircase, taking the light with her, and I scurry after her. I don’t want to be swallowed up in the shadows.

  We climb back up the staircase, and I breathe out all of the unnerving air from the strange room below.

  We make our way out of the medieval part of the castle and into a wing built in the seventeenth century, where I find a long, dark corridor lined with dusty portraits, some the size of my head, others larger than life. I spend a few minutes examining the depictions of men with kilts and women in frothy dresses.

  Poppy points to one of a grumpy old man with a top hat and a cane. “My great-great-grandfather,” she says, her voice a startling spark in the cold hall.

  “He looks very . . . forbidding.” I frown right back at him.

  “My favorite is the Grey Lady,” she says, beckoning me to another portrait. It’s one I passed before but didn’t pay much attention to: a woman in a soft gray dress, her skin almost the same pale color as the ruffled confection she wears, in front of a mountain landscape backdrop. At first glance I judged her as boring—her pale eyes are blank and stare just past the viewer, it seems. But I notice now a sadness in her slightly parted lips, a haunted look in those eyes that moments before I’d thought to be devoid of character.

  “Who was she?” I ask Poppy.

  “A great-great-great-aunt or something. I think she lived here in the early eighteen hundreds. She fell in love with a farmer, but her father made her break it off with him since he wasn’t a duke or whatever. So she jumped off the roof onto the courtyard and killed herself.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. There have been stories about her ghost haunting this house ever since.”

  “Every creaky old house needs a ghost, I guess,” I say with a shrug. For a moment, I imagine this lovesick girl stepping out of her painting and roaming the halls, wringing her hands and sobbing.

  Poppy starts walking again, and I pull myself away from the disquieting portrait. She opens a big set of double doors at the end of the hall, and we enter an honest-to-goodness ballroom, a huge space with floor-to-ceiling windows, a shiny parquet floor, and gold-framed mirrors along the walls. I move slowly to the center of the room, my eyes wide as I try to take it all in. My mother used to read Jane Austen novels aloud to me, and whenever there was a scene at a ball, I pictured the ballrooms almost exactly like this. I look up to find a fresco painted on the ceiling, a vision of Aphrodite rising from her clamshell, ringed by cupids and cherubs. The goddess of love, presiding over the most romantic room I’ve ever seen.

  “Mum hosted three balls a year in here for her different charities,” Poppy tells me. “I would hide behind one of the plants,” she says, pointing to a cluster of potted trees and ferns in one corner with a green velvet bench in front of them, “and watch all the women in their ball gowns and all the men in their tuxedos. My mum always threw the most glamorous parties.”

  I realize then that, for Poppy, there is no part of this house that isn’t filled with ghosts.

  She leads me back into the medieval tower and up the staircase to the fifth floor, with her suite of rooms. “This is the family floor,” she says. “Charlie’s room is at that end.” She points to the left. “And my parents’ room is at that end.” She points to the right. Both of us stare for a moment at the closed double doors at the end of the hall.

  “And that’s the tour,” she says, flouncing back into her room.

  “All right, then. Thank you,” I tell her, but she refuses to look at me. “So what do you usually do on Saturday afternoons?” I ask, making my voice painfully bright and cheery.

  She shrugs. “Usually more homework. Or read. Or ride Copperfield, if I have time. I have a big show in a couple of months, so I’m practicing all the jumps with him.”

  “How about you introduce me to Copperfield?” I ask. “I’ve never ridden a horse before.”

  “Never?” she asks.

  I shake my head with a smile. Despite growing up in a West Texas town with an annual rodeo and more livestock than people, I always managed to avoid horses, scared off by their size and unpredictability. I’ve never even touched one before.

  She almost smiles back, then catches herself. But that brief slip gives me hope.

  “I guess we can go see him,” she says with a shrug.

  She bounds through the halls and out a b
ack door, hurtling down the hill past various sheds and a tall wall of hedges. “That’s the maze,” she says, pointing to it as she strides past.

  “A maze?” I ask. I approach the opening in the hedges and see more shrubbery walls inside, and a path leading into the depths. The walls are at least four feet taller than I am. A place where someone could get thoroughly lost, I think, and shiver.

  “Yeah. My great-great-grandfather or something had it built because he wanted a place he could hide with his mistresses where no one could find him.”

  “Charming,” I snort, and Poppy murmurs in agreement.

  Finally, we reach a large wooden barn, which looks much newer than anything else on the property. “Dad built this for me when he gave me Copperfield,” Poppy explains as we walk into the large, shadowed space. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust and see the horses in their stalls.

  A guy who looks only a few years older than I am is brushing down a horse with silky rust-colored hair, the one Poppy was riding earlier, and Poppy leads me to him. “I’ll take that, Gareth,” she says. He surrenders the brush to Poppy with a smile and nods his head at me, and I realize that he was the one who helped her off the horse earlier this morning.

  “I’m Fee,” I say, holding out my hand.

  He shakes my hand slowly, lingering in the motion. “Gareth. And I ken who ye are right enough. This place is small.” His brogue is so thick, with such wildly rolling Rs, that I can barely understand him. I try to translate the words in my head, but his wide, knowing smile is easy enough to interpret. I pull my hand out of his grasp, but I can’t bite back my own smile. He chuckles a bit and pats Copperfield’s side before stepping out of the stall. “It’ll be too much fog for riding this afternoon, miss,” he tells Poppy.

  She nods. “I’ll just brush her down then. Fee’s never ridden a horse before.”

  Gareth turns his deep brown eyes to me, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Really now?”

  “Not much of a horse person,” I explain, reaching out a tentative hand to pat the neck of the absolutely massive horse in front of me. His hair is more bristly than I expected, and I can feel the thick, powerful muscles underneath it.

  “Well, Poppy here knows everything about horses. She can teach you whatever you need to know. Or I can, if you’d rather.” He offers me another flirtatious grin, and I shake my head at his lack of subtlety. There’s something endearing about how open he is, though. It’s completely harmless flirting, which makes it all too easy to respond to. And he’s cute enough, too, with messy muddy-brown hair and broad shoulders.

  “I’ll make sure she does,” I say, smiling at Poppy. There’s a faint hint of a blush on her cheeks and a pleased smile playing on her mouth.

  Gareth nods at me before grabbing a bucket and heading out of the barn.

  “He’s dating Alice, one of the maids,” Poppy whispers to me as soon as he’s gone. “And they think we don’t all know about it.”

  I’m surprised, but I try not to show it. I can’t imagine practical, blunt Alice with someone like Gareth. And he was way too flirtatious with me, even if it didn’t mean anything. “Why is it a secret?” I whisper back.

  “Mabs doesn’t approve of staff relationships.”

  “Mabs doesn’t seem to approve of much of anything,” I say, and there it is again: Poppy’s almost-smile. She catches herself at the last moment, and her face smooths out into its usual expression of sullen boredom. But for that brief moment, she completely brightened.

  Once Poppy’s cleaned Copperfield’s colossal hooves and settled him in for the night, we head back to the house. A dense fog has come in, rolling off from the mountain. “Is it always like this?” I ask Poppy, waving my hand around in the thickening air.

  “This time of year, yes. Dad used to call this the witching hour, when the ghosts and fairies would come out and walk among us, just out of sight.”

  It sounds like the kind of story my mom used to tell me. I shudder, my eyes darting around, as if I’m actually expecting to see an apparition rippling through the fog. I don’t relax until we reach the castle door.

  Poppy’s done enough homework for a Saturday, so I ask the cook if she’ll send dinner for the two of us up to Poppy’s sitting room, where we curl up in blankets and watch some mindless English romantic comedy that makes Poppy almost-laugh a few times. That positive development makes up for Mabel’s cold stare of disapproval when she brings up our bowls of beef stew and thick hunks of brown bread. No matter what she thinks, I think Poppy and I will work together just fine.

  CHAPTER 4

  Once Poppy has gone to bed, I’m left to confront the one thing that has been bothering me all day: the lie I told Poppy. Or, rather, what I didn’t tell her. I try to busy myself by unpacking my suitcase, taking a long shower in the bathroom down the hall that I share with the maids and female kitchen staff, checking my email on the computer in the servants’ common room. Hex wrote begging for information about Scotland, reminding me of the boring details of her job at the Buffalo Head Café, the most popular of the three illustrious dining options in Mulespur. She writes about how lucky I am to have escaped the monotony of serving endless chicken-fried steaks to drunk fans after every Friday night football game, and tells me she sort of misses me. I send her a long, rambling email back, telling her about Poppy and the castle and Mabel and Albert and everything else that makes up this place I’ve found myself in.

  No matter what I do, though, I can’t stop thinking about my mother and, after a while, I don’t have the energy to try. I give up and go to my closet to get the shoebox, the most important possession that traveled with me from Austin to Mulespur. The vessel that holds my past.

  I open it and remove the photos and the note, letting memory take me over.

  I told Poppy that my mother died in an accident. It’s what I tell everyone, except Hex, who knows the more complicated truth.

  I was almost seven when I realized that there was something wrong with Mom. I’d gone with her to the supermarket in East Austin to find something cheap for dinner. We were standing in the cereal aisle, and I was impatient because my mother was comparing prices. We were surrounded by other shoppers, everyone delicately maneuvering their carts in the small space, faces blank and tired as they scanned the contents of the shelves.

  All of a sudden, my mother grabbed my arm and pulled me to her.

  “Stay away from her!” she yelled as I fought to escape her viselike grip. It took me a second to realize that she was talking to an old man near us. He looked up in surprise, his watery blue eyes flicking from me to my mother. He couldn’t have looked more harmless if he’d tried: his back hunched over, his white hair covered by a newsboy cap, his face inundated with wrinkles.

  “You can’t have her!” my mother screamed, over and over, clutching me to her so tightly that I would have fingerprint bruises on my arms for weeks.

  A security guard in an ill-fitting uniform had to escort us out of the market. I could feel everyone’s eyes following us as my mother continued screaming that the man was trying to take me away from her.

  She’d displayed paranoiac tendencies before, often convinced that someone was following us or listening in on our conversations in the apartment. But she had never reacted so violently, so publicly before. I finally realized that other people’s mothers didn’t act that way, that most kids didn’t have to triple-check that the front door was bolted and the shades of the windows were drawn at all times.

  When we got home, she slept for hours.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she told me the next day. “I don’t mean to be that way.” And most of the time, she wasn’t. Most of the time, she was my charming mother, who told me stories and made me eat my vegetables and tucked me into bed every night.

  But after a while, her episodes started getting worse and worse. She told me that if she told a doctor, they would put her on med
ication and take me away from her. I learned how to be very careful around my school friends, to make sure they never knew what was happening in my tiny garage apartment.

  Then, one afternoon, she wouldn’t let me into the apartment after school. She was supposed to be on shift at the café, but instead she was holed up inside. I unlocked the door, but she’d pushed her bed and my futon and everything else we owned up against it, and I could only get it open a crack. But I could hear her raving through the wall. “Get out!” she screamed. “You can’t take me away! Get out!”

  “Mama?” I said. It came out as a whimper. I hadn’t called her “Mama” in years, not since I was a baby. “Mama, it’s me. It’s just me.”

  “You’ll hurt me, I know you’ll hurt me. You seem so nice and soft, but it’s all deceit, I know it is. I know it now!”

  “Mama, I just want to come in. I’ll make you dinner. It will all be fine, you’ll see.”

  “No!” she screamed, like someone was attacking her. “You can’t take me!” And then there was a bang—a gunshot, I knew right away—and she stopped ranting.

  I must have screamed. I must have screamed loudly and for a long while, because by the time the neighbors came home and came up to see what was wrong, my throat was scratched and my voice was gone. And so was my mother.

  The social worker they put in charge of me asked, “Why didn’t you call an ambulance when you first got home?” She was a woman of soft smiles and reassuring hand-squeezes, but I could see the judgment in her eyes.

  “She always told me not to call anyone,” I answered, my voice hardly more than a whisper. “She said it would pass, that I should just wait it out. If I called an ambulance, they would have taken me away from her.”

  I know now that I should have fought Mom, that I should have done whatever I could have to bring her to a hospital years before. But I was too scared, too young to know what was really going on, and it all happened so fast. I thought she would recover, the way she’d always recovered from her episodes.