Three Graces

by Victoria Connelly

  ‘I agree,’ Ash Brodie said at last, nodding from his place at the table. ‘Keep in line with the recent increase at Barston.’

  Barston Hall, Carys had learned, was Amberley’s biggest rival. Just across the border in Eastmoreland, it was known as Bastard Hall because of the behaviour of its owner, Roland Buckley-Stewart, The Earl of Eastmoreland. Richard and he had been at boarding school together and, ever since, had been unofficial rivals.

  ‘But Barston has so much more on offer than we do,’ Pearl Janson chipped in, her voice squeaky clean like one of the tea towels she sold in the shop. ‘Their shop is three times the size of ours and offers so many more quality goods.’

  Carys, who had already been sent on a mission as undercover spy, remembered the beautifully wooden-floored shop with its gleaming counter and cute pots of jam, hand-crafted jewellery and exquisite pottery all stamped with the Earl’s coat of arms.

  ‘Our stock really should be updated,’ Pearl went on hopefully.

  ‘Has anybody else got any comments?’ Richard asked, keen to move on.

  ‘I think we should definitely put up the entrance fee,’ Pearl said, misguidedly believing that her precious shop would see some more money if more profits were to be made by the Amberley Estate.

  ‘Okay then,’ Richard said. ‘We’ll carry that motion forward.’

  Carys’s eyes widened. She’d achieved something.

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  Eleven pairs of eyes cast down to their laps. Everyone was keen to venture back to their own particular corner of the estate and have a cup of tea.

  ‘Right, see you next week,’ Richard said, and everybody got up to leave.

  Carys waited behind with Richard who was tidying up the stack of paperwork he’d brought into the meeting with him.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He looked up, his face pale and tired. ‘What?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to say, well done?’

  ‘The entrance fee should have been increased years ago,’ he said.

  Carys frowned. He hadn’t thought that when she’d mentioned it to him in the walled garden that first time she’d visited Amberley.

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘that’s why I suggested it.’

  He nodded. He was miles away. She had faded into the background once again.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said.

  Would he, she wondered? Would he really see her? Or would it just be a peck on the cheek at bed time before he sunk beneath the duvet in a deep sleep. She watched him leave the room and sighed.

  She’d been so angry with Richard that she’d completely forgotten about the strange disembodied voice until the next day.

  She’d decided to return to the Montella Room with a copy of the Amberley Court guidebook. There was so much to learn: names, positions, dates of birth, and causes of death, who was related to whom, scandals …

  ‘You can always ask me, you know.’

  Carys instantly dropped the guidebook.

  ‘Who said that?’

  She looked around the room. She was completely alone. Or so she thought.

  ‘You can’t see me, can you?’

  ‘Cecily?’ Carys whispered. But she knew it wasn’t Cecily. She wouldn’t put it past her to play such tricks but the mysterious voice didn’t belong to a child.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The room suddenly fell silent, broken only by the soft ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece above the fire.

  ‘Where are you?’ Carys whispered into the silence. But there was no reply. The voice, or whatever it was Carys had heard, had vanished.

  The next time she’d heard it was during the storm in the night, but it hadn’t been words that time - the voice had been singing - humming. Carys felt sure that it was the same voice she’d heard in the Montella Room, and she also felt sure that she had to discover exactly who it was.

  Chapter 11

  Who did you turn to when you started hearing voices? Should she tell Richard? Could husbands still have wives locked away for such things? Carys had been on the verge of telling him several times that evening.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she’d begun and he’d looked up from his newspaper and smiled at her encouragingly. It was the first real smile he’d given her all day and she wanted to bathe in it for a while and not turn it into a frown, so she’d said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t work so hard,’ instead of ‘I think Amberley might be haunted.’

  Later that evening, when they’d been snuggled up on the sofa together, she’d bitten her lip and begun again. ‘I was in the Montella Room today and I heard the strangest-’

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Cecily’s hidden my doll again,’ Evie had shouted, running into the room and leaping onto her father’s lap, demanding all his attention.

  Then, when they’d gone to bed, she’d said, ‘I think there might be a problem.’ She’d waited anxiously for Richard’s response before continuing.

  ‘Tell me in the morning,’ he’d said, kissing her cheek and falling into a deep sleep. Carys had immediately felt guilty. He’d had his share of problems for one day. What right did she have to burden him with another?

  So she called Louise.

  ‘But you don’t believe in ghosts, Carys,’ she said, walking into the grand hallway after work the next day. ‘I distinctly remember you saying that all that sort of thing was absolute twaddle - to use your technical term.’

  Carys blushed as she remembered how quick she’d been to write-off the whole of the spiritual world. ‘Yes, but these things always are twaddle until you experience them for yourself.’

  Louise considered this for a moment. ‘You thought the same thing about the aristocracy, didn’t you?’

  ‘All right. Don’t rub it in.’

  Louise grinned. ‘Come on, then, where’s this ghost?’

  Carys led the way to the Montella Room.

  ‘Wow!’ Louise exclaimed. ‘Look at this. Look at the size of that table!’

  ‘We have the estate meetings her each week. And this is where I first heard the voice.’

  ‘The woman’s voice?’

  Carys nodded.

  ‘And what did she say again?’

  ‘That’s the strange part. It was really odd things like: ‘Silly old fool!’ and ‘pompous old windbag!’ And then she said, ‘These meetings are nothing but a waste of time.’

  ‘But nobody else heard the voice,’ Louise said.

  ‘I know. It was really strange. The other times I’ve heard it is when I’ve been alone so I can’t really be sure, you know?’

  Louise paced around the room as if looking for something that might prove the ghost existed.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, pointing to a beautifully carved wooden box.

  ‘A knife box,’ Carys said without thinking.

  ‘Who’s she?’ Louise asked, looking up at a painting.

  ‘Georgiana,’ Carys said. It was one of the portraits she had managed to commit to memory so far.

  ‘She’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Carys said, staring at the porcelain pale face and the bewitching smile. The artist, Leo Montella, had definitely caught the sparkle of her eyes.

  ‘Is that her too?’ Louise asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Carys said. ‘There are several portraits of her in the house. She was something of a society beauty.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Look,’ Carys said, remembering that she’d asked Louise here for advice and not to stand around admiring paintings, ‘do you feel anything peculiar in this room?’

  Louise’s face furrowed in a serious frown as she concentrated, her eyes surveying the room once again, sweeping over every surface and examining every shadowy corner. ‘Nope,’ she said at last. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  Carys sighed.

  ‘But I think somebody’s overdone it with the furniture polish,’ Louise added as if that might help.

  ‘Yes,’ Carys agreed. ‘They’re not meant to use it
at all. I must get on to that.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So, you don’t feel anything out of the ordinary?’

  ‘Only a bit chilly. These rooms are freezing.’

  Carys rolled her eyes. She was wasting her time. She’d had such hopes for Louise too. She’d always been more in tune with these sort of things. She was always the one to read out the horoscopes in the office; always the one to get her palm read if ever there was a passing gypsy.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Carys said. ‘Let’s have a quick tour and then a cup of tea.’

  ‘I can’t believe this is your home now,’ Louise said as they walked through the Long Gallery. ‘I mean just look at all these things: all these books and paintings and vases

  And stuff.’ She let out a long, low whistle.

  Carys nodded. ‘It does seem unfair that one family gets to keep all this, doesn’t it? But Richard explained it to me once. He said that it’s because of the fact that one family - one line of that family: the male heirs - keep it, that it exists at all.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, most of us don’t keep what our family leaves us - not everything.’

  ‘If most families are like mine then they don’t have anything valuable to leave in the first place,’ Louise pointed out.

  ‘Exactly. But it’s wonderful to have these houses with these great collections because, otherwise, all these things would have to be distributed: a set of chairs to one son, a cabinet to a daughter and a painting to another. Everything would get parted and lost down the centuries and there’d be no way of getting it all back together.’

  Louise narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re defending the aristocracy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Carys said. ‘I suppose I am. I didn’t understand it all before,’ Carys said in her defence.

  ‘And now you do?’

  ‘I have to. I’m part of it all now.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Louise whistled. ‘Should I bow or curtsy?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Carys laughed. ‘Just promise to visit me more often and I’ll be happy.’

  Leaving the Long Gallery, Carys opened a door which led into the Music Room. She hardly ever ventured into this part of the house and it still amazed her to see what each room held. But it wasn’t the treasures of the room which held her spellbound today. It was the atmosphere. The Music Room was filled with the honied light of early evening and yet there was something vaguely shadowy about it too.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ Carys asked in a hushed, reverent tone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone’s just been in here.’

  ‘Have they?’

  Carys looked around the room. She felt strange. Her skin felt as if it were buzzing.

  ‘The piano!’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Someone’s been playing it.’

  ‘But we would have heard it, surely?’

  ‘The lid’s up - look,’ Carys said, pointing. ‘The lid should never be kept up like that.’ Carys walked across the room towards it. She had the strangest feeling that the piano had been played - very recently - yet there was nobody around. The lid was up but there wasn’t any physical proof that it had been played: piano keys didn’t stay pressed down, and yet the notes seemed to be hanging in the air like some strange aura. She could almost reach out and touch them.

  ‘Carys?’

  She turned round. Louise looked concerned.

  ‘How’s about that cup of tea you promised me?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she said.

  They left the room and Carys couldn’t help feeling slightly disgruntled that she hadn’t been able to stay longer but what would that have proved?

  ‘You know,’ Louise began a few minutes later once they’d sat down with a cup of tea, ‘I think you need to get out more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be cooped up in this place all day long.’

  ‘Cooped up? You can’t be cooped up at Amberley - there are probably over twenty miles of corridors.’

  ‘But it’s not good for you. You need to get outside.’

  ‘But I do!’ Carys protested. ‘I take the dogs out. You’ve no idea how far we walk each day.’

  Louise didn’t look convinced. ‘I’m worried this place is getting to you. All these gloomy rooms with their dark panelling and moody curtains.’

  Carys laughed. ‘They’re not gloomy or moody.’

  ‘Well, I think they are, and I think they’re affecting your brain.’

  Carys put her cup down. ‘You don’t believe a word I’ve told you, do you?’

  Louise’s eyes suddenly flooded with sympathy. ‘Of course I do-’

  ‘But you don’t really believe that the voices are real, do you? I saw the way you looked at me in the Music Room.’

  ‘Carys! You’re getting all worked up. Anyway, listen, I might be able to help you - if you’d just give me a chance.’

  Carys instantly shut up.

  ‘There’s this woman,’ Louise began, ‘Lara something-or-other. She’s got a reputation for being a bit mad but I once read this interview with her in Cuthland Life and she sounded as if she knew what she was talking about.’

  ‘What was she talking about?’

  ‘Ghosts,’ Louise said matter-of-factly. ‘The spirit world. That’s her job.’

  ‘You think I should employ some sort of ghost-buster?’

  ‘Well, what else were you thinking of doing?’

  Carys puffed out her cheeks. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’

  ‘Well, you should,’ Louise said. ‘This is your home now and, if it’s really haunted, I think you’d better do something about it.’

  Chapter 12

  After raiding the downstairs cloakroom for copies of Cuthland Life, Carys managed to track down the article Louise had mentioned. Not wanting to be caught reading it, she closed the cloakroom door and sat down on the loo seat.

  “Who You Gonna Call? Ghost-buddy!”

  Carys rolled her eyes but read on.

  Former socialite, Lara Claridge, is a ghost’s best friend. Here, she tells of some of her most recent encounters with the spirit world.

  Sitting on the toilet seat, Carys read about Ms Claridge’s experience in a medieval manor house just across the border in Eastmoreland.

  ‘She was a very friendly ghost. Just wanted somebody to talk to.’

  Then there was the disruptive spirit who obviously didn’t agree with the renovations the new owners were doing to what he still considered his property.

  ‘It can be very unsettling seeing such drastic changes being made. We have to consider the feelings of the dead as well as the living.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Carys said. It was all incredibly fascinating but could this woman really help her?

  Rolling up the magazine, Carys left the safety of the cloakroom and headed for the Yellow Drawing Room. It was usually quiet and she’d be able to make a phone call without being overheard. Luckily, Ms Claridge’s number was in the telephone book and, when she answered the phone, Ms Claridge sounded very much like anybody else. Carys wasn’t quite sure what she had been expecting but she was quickly put at ease and an appointment was made for the very next day.

  ‘I don’t like to keep a spirit waiting,’ she told Carys. ‘If they have something to say then it’s best to listen.’

  Of course, Carys found it impossible to sleep but, after several hours of tossing and turning, worrying about how she was going to keep this business from Richard, she fell asleep just as the sky was beginning to lighten and the first birdsong soared across the gardens.

  As usual, Richard left for the estate office at the crack of dawn which came as a relief as Carys didn’t relish the idea of explaining Ms Claridge’s visit. She dressed quickly and splashed her face with water before tying her hair back into a ponytail and applying the lightest touches of make-up. She shared a quick breakfast with Cecily and Evie before packing t
hem off to their tutor and beginning the long walk to the heart of the house.

  Carys mused on the irony of her situation. A few months ago, she had been a sceptic who didn’t believe in ghosts and didn’t believe in the aristocracy. Now, she was a marchioness living in a haunted house. Somehow, she couldn’t help thinking things had gone horribly wrong.

  Reaching the Yellow Drawing Room, she looked out of the window. Facing south, the room was bathed in sunshine, its walls seeming to hum with colour. And it was from this room that Carys saw Lara Claridge arrive. Just as the French clock chimed nine, a small red Marlva Van bounced up the driveway, its suspension worthy of a museum.

  ‘Punctuality is my middle name,’ Lara Claridge had told Carys the day before. ‘Well, actually, it’s Lavinia, but nothing ever gets sorted out satisfactorily by someone who can’t be bothered to be on time.’

  Carys agreed but, as she watched the van coming to an abrupt halt on the gravel driveway, she wondered if she’d done the right thing. What if she’d made a huge mistake? What if it was all in her head? She’d hardly slept a wink all night for wondering. She’d even thought about venturing back into the Music Room but was too afraid to walk through the house at night.

  But it was too late to change her mind now. She watched as the rainbow-clad ex-society hostess emerged from her Marlva Van, clutching a terrifyingly large tapestry holdall. The voice may have sounded perfectly normal on the phone, and the dimly-lit photograph of her in Cuthland Life had seemed perfectly ordinary but nothing could have prepared Carys for the vision that greeted her. Her eyes widened in wonder as she took in the bouffant hair which shone like moonshine, the lips painted poppy red, the face not so much dusted as detonated with powder, and the multi-coloured dress-coat depicting orchids, waterfalls, hummingbirds and beetles.

  ‘So pleased to meet you,’ she said as soon as Carys opened the door. ‘Well, I say pleased but, of course, it’s rather unfortunate for you to have to meet me, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ Carys said. ‘Thank you so much for coming out straight away.’

  ‘Have to, my dear. If it’s one thing I’ve leaned in this profession, it’s that the spirit world does not appreciate being kept waiting.’