by Anita Frank
The warm light from the wall sconces spilt comfortingly into my room. I edged myself against the door jamb, the artery in my neck pulsing. The crying was clearer now. This was no breeze through an ill-fitting window. It was unmistakable, and the sheer visceral quality of it took my breath away. I was startled by the click of Madeleine’s door lock. A moment later, her pale face appeared.
‘You hear it?’ she whispered. I couldn’t speak. I simply nodded. She leant against the door frame. ‘Thank God.’ She observed my terror with pity. ‘It comes from the nursery.’ Experience had made her stoical.
I nodded again. I had not attempted to look up the corridor. A basic instinct had advised me against it, but I knew I must. The wall lights stopped just short of the nursery staircase, their soothing golden glow failing to reach its treads. Instead the dark mahogany steps wallowed in a milky pool of moonlight cast through the window at the end.
The staircase called to me like a siren, drawing me in, exerting an irresistible pull. I stepped out onto the landing.
Another plaintive sob split the silence. I fought the desire to flee; instead, I thought of Madeleine, and the unwavering loyalty she had shown me when Gerald died – she had defended me when I was incapable of protecting myself. The roles were reversed now – she needed my protection, my courage, and she would have it.
‘I’m going up.’
‘Oh, Stella, no …’ An internal struggle raged behind her look of horror. Conquering her fears, she slid from her doorway to join me. She looked ridiculously spectral herself, in her high-necked white nightgown that skimmed the floor. But then, I realised, so did I: ghosts in the night.
‘I am going,’ I reiterated, hoping if I said it enough times, I might eventually leave the protection of my doorway. Sure enough, my feet shuffled forwards.
Madeleine’s fingers caught at the floating fabric of my nightdress in a half-hearted attempt to stop me, but I easily pulled free from her fragile grip. Every ounce of common sense I possessed was screaming at me to turn and run as I made my wary advance.
Breathing hard, I grabbed the banister and mounted the first step. The polished wood was cold and unwelcoming beneath my bare feet. Moving upwards took concentrated effort, like wading through water. Somehow, I managed another step, and then another, each creaking in protest as they took my weight, vexed by my presence. I came abreast of Lucien’s portrait, wreathed in shadows. The whites of his eyes glinted through the darkness.
I was petrified as I took the final step onto the gloomy landing, the doors closed against me. There were audible gasps and splutters in the sobbing now, and it was utterly inconceivable to me that I might not find a living soul within the nursery, so vivid – so vulnerable – were the sounds emanating from that room. The air was stagnant and achingly cold. I stared at the door, daunted by the prospect of my next move. Another sob seeped out, ebbing and flowing. I had never heard such a wretched sound.
Something at the servants’ entrance played in my peripheral vision; a jagged breath snagged in my throat. The violence of my quivering limbs paralysed me, but though my neck was rigid, I forced myself to look. Behind the obscured glass, a blurred face appeared in a golden orb. The door handle dipped down.
Annie Burrows emerged from the pitch of the servants’ corridor dressed only in her cotton nightgown, holding aloft a candle in a brass holder.
‘Annie!’ My shoulders sagged with relief. ‘Did you hear anything?’
‘Crying.’
But now only silence filled the frigid air.
We waited, time dragging, while the icy boards bit hungrily into the naked soles of our feet. The flickering light cast by Annie’s candle played upon her cheek, illuminating a strange intensity in her expression. My heart kicked stronger against my ribs. Her company provided paltry comfort.
Just as I decided to call a halt to this unsettling vigil, it came again: a faint sob, the death throes of hysteria. I knew what needed to be done, but I cowered from the task. Without consultation, and showing none of my fear, Annie stepped forward and turned the handle. The nursery door swung wide.
The room was empty. A shaft of moonlight was the only intruder, beaming in through the mullioned window, to highlight the furnishings. Collecting what fragments of courage I had left, I stepped onto the threshold. An arctic breeze leaked from the room, swirling around my bare ankles, sending shivers up my legs.
‘There’s no one here,’ I murmured, mystified. The maid said nothing. Her candle flame guttered. ‘How can that be?’
I backed away, confused and perturbed. Annie drew the door to behind her. I heard my name drift up the staircase, and gathering myself, I hurried to the top step, resting my hand on the banister. Madeleine had bravely progressed as far as the newel post below. She was looking up at me, a diaphanous sprite in the silver moonlight.
‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s empty. The nursery – there’s no one there,’ I whispered back.
At precisely that moment I felt an inexplicable shifting of pressure in the atmosphere. Annie cried, ‘Don’t!’ and the next thing I knew I was plunging forwards. Madeleine screeched my name. My fingers anchored me to the banister and I crashed into the railing.
‘Stella, my God! Are you all right?’
I was stunned and winded, but thankfully still in one piece. Annie’s face loomed at the top of the staircase.
‘Why did you say that?’ I gasped. ‘Why did you say “don’t”?’
But I didn’t need her to answer – I already knew.
Annie Burrows had not been speaking to me.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Who were you talking to?’ I demanded, terrified of her answer.
‘Stella, do come off the stairs before you fall again,’ Madeleine pleaded.
‘I didn’t fall.’
The maid shifted uneasily.
I gripped the handrail for dear life, my feet firmly planted. I was about to press the girl again when I was distracted by the servants’ door opening. My heart sank as Mrs Henge emerged onto the landing dressed in a plaid dressing gown, its rope cord tightly knotted at her waist. Her grey hair hung in a thick plait over her breast, jarringly feminine and at odds with the masculine cut of her general appearance. She flicked a switch by the door and I flinched as bright light flooded the landing.
‘Annie Burrows, what on earth are you doing out here?’ she demanded. A grey eyebrow pitched upwards as she caught sight of me, hovering on the staircase. Her face fell into its usual impassive mask. ‘I didn’t see you there, Miss Marcham. I thought I heard a cry.’
‘Crying,’ I corrected her.
‘No, miss, a single cry – a shout, if you will.’
My chest grew tight. ‘My sister, she thought I was falling: she called out my name.’
‘I see.’ Her curious gaze fluttered over all of us. ‘You are quite well, miss?’
I nodded.
‘Very well.’ It was impossible to know what she was thinking. She asked no questions, accepting without comment the eccentricity of us clustering in the dark on a disused landing. She turned to go.
‘Mrs Henge!’ Her name leapt out before I could stop it. I cursed my stupidity, but the damage had already been done: her focus was upon me. ‘You didn’t hear anything else? Just that single shout – you are quite sure you heard no actual crying?’
‘No, miss, I did not.’ With a curt nod of her head, she was gone. Annie tried to slip away after her, but I had no intention of letting her escape that easily. I sprang up to the landing and caught her arm.
‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’
‘I can’t help you, miss.’
‘Who were you talking to?’
‘No one, miss.’
My face was just inches from hers. ‘I felt them, Annie.’
She struggled against my grasp, but I merely tightened the cuff of my fingers. ‘Whose hands pushed me down those stairs?’ She shook her head violently. I increased the pinch of my grip. ‘Who w
as it?’
With a small cry, she yanked her arm free and stumbled back, rubbing at the tender flesh, her bottom lip jutting out, stubborn and resentful. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I think you do.’ And the hibernating creature that had lain dormant in the darkest corner of my mind finally roused. Its vague pulse strengthened. It stirred. It was waking now, and nothing could stop it. ‘What is it about you and your father, Annie Burrows?’
‘Stella! What are you still doing up there? Won’t you come down now? Please.’
Gifted the distraction of Madeleine’s appeal, Annie made a dash for the servants’ door, but I recovered in time to slam my palm upon its glass panel.
‘I know what I felt, Annie.’ My eyes searched her face. ‘Help me, please.’ My whispered plea split precariously, as the terror of the evening’s events finally struck home.
‘Like I said, miss, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she hissed as she yanked back the door, dislodging me. Before I could stop her, she was gone, the blurred glow of her candle flame retreating into nothingness.
I sank my face into my hands. Had I imagined it? Had I imagined all of it? Had the sobbing soldiers of my nightmare invaded reality?
I might have been able to convince myself of just that – had it not been for the two small palm prints still burning on the base of my back.
I was shaking uncontrollably by the time my feet sank into the landing carpet. Madeleine took my hand.
‘My God, you’re freezing. Come, let’s get you wrapped up.’
She put her arm around my shoulders and led me to my room, banishing the fearful dark with a flick of the light switch. She left my side while she retrieved my wrapper and I picked up my cigarettes from the mantel, slipping one between my lips. I tried to strike a match, but my trembling hands made it impossible.
‘Here, let me.’ Madeleine set my wrapper down on the back of the chair and gently took the matchbox. The match took with the first strike, a phosphorous taint filling the air as the flame burst forth. She cupped it with her hand and guided it to the end of my cigarette. I drew in, relishing the soothing sensation of the smoke pooling into my lungs. The cigarette dangled from my lip as Madeleine slipped the wrapper over my arms and belted it around my waist as if I were a child, incapable. I collapsed into an armchair. She took the one opposite, perching on its edge, her hands clasped together as if in prayer.
‘Stella, are you all right?’
I nodded, drawing greedily on the cigarette, holding onto its vapours for as long as I could, only releasing them when I spoke. ‘It was completely empty, Madeleine, the nursery. There was nothing there.’
‘But you heard it, you heard the crying?’
I nodded again. I decided not to mention my disconcerting suspicion that Annie and I had not been alone on the landing.
‘Is it wrong of me to feel so happy?’ Her flat voice contradicted her words. ‘I am so relieved that it’s not just me. After so many weeks of being met with ridicule …’ Her fingers twisted in her lap. ‘I’m just so relieved.’ I detected the smallest of lifts in her tone; I tried to summon a smile but couldn’t. While my trembling was finally beginning to subside, the furore in my mind was mounting – and still the icy imprints burnt my skin.
‘I am just very sorry Mrs Henge had to discover us,’ Madeleine continued. ‘She will no doubt mention it to Lady Brightwell. But we know what we heard, don’t we, Stella?’
I ground my cigarette stub into the stone of the fireplace and tapped another from the box. I managed the match myself this time, its rasp renting the silence that had descended between us.
‘Who do you think it is?’ Madeleine whispered at last, drawing closer. ‘Do you really think Lucien Brightwell could be haunting this house?’
I pulled on the cigarette, staring sightlessly into the dark grate, the skin on my lower back tingling with recall: short fingers, squat palms – a child’s hands.
‘It’s possible.’
Madeleine sat back in her chair. I realised for the first time that she was still dressed only in her nightgown and must surely be feeling the cold. Guilty she had once again cared for my needs whilst neglecting her own, I got up and retrieved a cardigan from my chest of drawers. Wordlessly I handed it to her, leaning against the fireplace, smoking, as she stood and added the extra layer. The bruised sacks beneath her eyes contrasted sharply with her chalky complexion. She looked exhausted. I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out.
‘You should get some rest, Madeleine. There’s nothing more either of us can do tonight.’
She agreed, but made no attempt to leave, still preoccupied with the night’s events. ‘I almost can’t believe it’s true – that this house is haunted.’ The flimsiness of her self-esteem caused my heart to ache. What hell she must have been through, being made to question her own sanity? Of course, I knew something of that, but grief was generally accepted – believing in ghosts was not. ‘And Annie heard it too, did she? Then we can’t all be wrong, can we, Stella? They must believe us now.’
Annie Burrows. A finger of ice played over each bump of my vertebrae. She had heard the crying all right, but what had she seen? It had not been just the two of us inhabiting the darkness. The nursery had been empty, as far as I could see, but I now suspected Annie’s perceptions went further than mine.
It had been there all along – my childish deductions were seeming less fantastic with each passing second. I was increasingly convinced Annie had drawn aside the porous veil that separates this world from the next, just as I once believed her father had on the night of the fire, enabling him to rescue Lydia. She had seen something on that landing – as absurd as that might seem to my rational self.
I escorted Madeleine back to her room, neither of us daring to look at the nursery staircase, no longer innocuous in the opalescent moonlight.
Madeleine hesitated on the threshold of her room. ‘If it is Lucien, Stella, what do you think he wants?’
I thought of the force that sent me stumbling down the stairs.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered at last, ‘but I think we need to find out.’
And I knew precisely where to start.
Chapter Eighteen
I spent what was left of the night smoking cigarettes, until the room stank and so did I. It did nothing for my nerves at all.
I found myself unable to dispel the images gathered from the night of the fire. They crept into my mind’s eye unbidden and once there, I could not escape them: flames licking at the walls, panes exploding from windows, the cascading fragments twinkling against the night sky. I remembered the servants and labourers forming a bucket chain until the fire brigade arrived – but their efforts were futile, like fighting a wildfire with teardrops.
And I remembered Madeleine and me, searing heat snatching the oxygen from our lungs, tears streaming down our soot-smudged faces, unable to answer our parents’ desperate pleas as to where Lydia was. We simply didn’t know. To her eternal regret, Nanny had acquiesced to our demands for a round of hide and seek before bed – and Lydia was a master of the game. She was cunning when it came to concealing herself, and far too stubborn to be tricked out of hiding by calls that the game was over, that tea was ready … that the house was on fire. And yet Jim Burrows, a groom who had never set foot in Haverton Hall, would discover her in an upstairs cupboard within minutes of entering the deadly furnace.
I was still awake when Annie crept into my room at the start of the new day. Wrapped in my eiderdown I was tucked into a chair, sitting in wait, camouflaged by the early morning gloom. Unaware of my presence, she began seeing to the fire. The paper crackled as the flames took hold. I waited for the golden glow to illuminate her face before I spoke.
‘Who were you talking to last night, Annie?’
Startled, she cried out, her hand flying to her chest – extraordinary considering her calm demeanour in the night. On that freezing landing in the dark she had failed to show fear or
even any natural trepidation. I added all this to the evidence filed against her. The eiderdown rustled as I pitched forward.
‘You need to tell me the truth.’
She fussed about the grate, tidying up after herself, sullen and silent.
‘I remember the first time I ever saw you,’ I said, nestling back in my chair. ‘It was just after the fire. We came to pay our respects, my father and I, we came to your cottage – do you remember any of this?’ My mind strayed back to that leaden July day – my father ducking under the lintel of their front door, leading me into a small parlour crammed with stunned mourners. Someone had ushered us through to the kitchen, where Jim Burrows’ widow stood with her back to us, leaning against the wooden drainer, her sinewy arms tanned the colour of ripe hazelnuts. My father had clasped her hand and spoken kindly to her in muted tones, as tears fell down her cheeks with silent dignity.
There had been a bustle of movement, and Annie, then only five or six – about the same age as Lydia – had weaved her way through the forest of legs to confront our mourning. She had stood boldly before us all, her grubby hands on her hips, wearing a grass-stained pinafore, her ginger curls an unruly mass.
‘You kept insisting your father was sitting in the kitchen,’ I murmured, lost in the past, immersed in my recollection of how we had all dutifully shifted our gaze to the poignant empty rocker and how she had stamped her feet in frustration as she regarded our stricken faces, and crumpled into hysteria when her cajoling of the empty seat failed to elicit a response.
‘I was just a child, miss, a grieving child, prone to say anything.’
‘Oh, I think there’s more to it than that, Annie.’ There were hard chips of flint in my rough voice. I was exhausted – my head throbbed, my lungs were tight, and my mouth was tacky and tasted revolting. I was in no humour to dance around the mysterious maid. ‘You see, I saw your father the night of the fire, just before he ran into the house. No one could ever understand how he found Lydia so quickly – but I know how he did it.’ She disclosed a flicker of interest at last. I took a deep breath to steady my racing pulse. ‘I think he had help.’
