The Woman in the Mirror:

by Rebecca James

  But my father could not stop me. He did not want to stop me. He wanted me as far away from this house as possible; he wanted to pretend I had never been here, to never speak of me again, his disgrace of a daughter, his rotten flesh and blood.

  Chapter 25

  Cornwall, present day

  The morning after Jack’s party, Rachel climbed the two flights of stairs to reach Constance de Grey’s bedroom. She hadn’t ventured here since she had first arrived. Now, it seemed the obvious place to look. Constance had been the last person to leave Winterbourne. Could she have been protecting the key to its history?

  The climb was an effort due to her hangover. She hoped to find a distraction – and did, right away, for the bedroom door was unexpectedly open. Rachel stopped, smiled, and it seemed funny for an instant, as if someone was messing with her. She was certain she had closed this door on the first day with some force, hadn’t she? Seeing it now, she couldn’t have. Ignoring her anxiety, she stepped through.

  Inside, Constance’s room was stuffy considering it was unlived in, as if it had recently held living, breathing bodies. The two single beds were as she remembered, the old woman’s walking frame and drinking apparatus a reminder of her latterly decrepit state. There was a faint odour of lavender, which Rachel supposed came from her aunt’s clothes; certainly, after Seth died, his belongings retained a scent for far too long. Too long because with every inhalation, every time she held one of his shirts to her face and breathed him in, her agony was refreshed. Months on from the event, she begged his trace to leave her. In time, she found courage to give his clothes away. She kept just one sweater, and on those vulnerable occasions where she needed to hold it, it smelled a little old, a little musty, but nothing more.

  Had she been wrong to tell Jack about Seth? She had never shared the truth with anyone – it was too personal, too painful, and exposed the fragile points she preferred to keep hidden. Yet the moment had been right. Cornwall was loosening her defences, opening her up to the realisation that she didn’t have to be alone. Had she left the old Rachel behind in New York, struggling at a desk or chained to a phone, or had the real her been here all along, at Winterbourne, waiting to be found?

  She went to the old woman’s closet, a lumbering beast made of dark wood, and switched the little key in the door. Inside, the lavender aroma was strong. She ran her fingers over an array of fabrics that seemed to be from every stage of her aunt’s life: pretty summer dresses, light as lace, perfect for a sixteen-year-old Constance; a weighty fur she might have worn in her middle age; a lavish fox stole, the animal’s head and tail still attached and its glassy eyes shot; a collection of pastel silk blouses that were like water to touch; and several heavy ruched skirts that made Rachel think of stuffy librarians checking overdue fines. There were a few pairs of shoes at the foot of the wardrobe but no sign of what she was searching for.

  It didn’t take long to scour the rest of the space because it was so sparsely furnished. A chest of drawers revealed little except handkerchiefs and smelling salts, and a box that appeared promising held only pearls. She dropped to her knees to inspect the room from a different angle – and, immediately, spotted it.

  The trunk was strapped shut with leather buckles, the kind that belonged on Victorian train platforms next to unaccompanied young boys wearing shorts and knee socks. Rachel expected it to be heavy, maybe unbearably so, but it was surprisingly light and it took only a few attempts to drag it out from underneath Constance’s bed. She sneezed from the dust; yet within the powder was the unmistakable pattern of fingerprints, making her think that someone had accessed the trunk relatively recently. To her amazement, the straps unbuckled and the lid swung open without fuss. Inside the top it was handsomely printed: DE GREY, WINTERBOURNE, CORNWALL. A four-word address, no further details needed.

  At first she thought it held schoolbooks, dozens of them, some thick with good-quality covers, others notepads that were falling apart at their spines. On some Constance had scribbled her name in a juvenile hand; others were blank. Some were inkblotched and age-stained; others appeared new, as if they had been bought last week in the newsagent’s in Polcreath. Rachel flicked through one, then the next. All contained the same thing: the elaborate handwritten scrawl of Constance de Grey.

  *

  It was difficult to work out the chronology. Constance hadn’t dated any of her diaries, nor were the books conventionally laid out in weeks and months. Instead they showed a near-continuous soliloquy running across lined pages that might just as easily have been used for shopping lists. The only clue Rachel had was the progression of the writing itself, and that wasn’t always reliable. Frequently she would find herself in the middle of a journal, having decided she was reading a teenage Constance, when suddenly a note would bring her up short: a reference to some anachronism like a TV, or else Edmund’s thirtieth birthday, which of course would also have been her own.

  For hours, she didn’t move from that spot in the twins’ bedroom. She forgot about her hangover, about Jack, about the chill prickling through the thick yarn of her sweater – even, for the very first time, she forgot about Seth – and the day started to fade, the morning’s sun smothered in cloud by lunchtime and drizzling grey by three. Still, she kept reading. It was hard to know how consistently the diaries had been kept. Swathes of time were missing, and Rachel found herself jumping from one childish book to another more mature one, with seemingly no stepping-stone in between. Some of the entries detailed the conventional musings of a growing girl – observations about Winterbourne, frustrations against her schoolwork, in her teenage years a boy in Polcreath she had dared to hold hands with – while others were more bizarre. Constance referred a lot, throughout her life, to an unnamed female:

  She’s horrible to me.

  She’s doing it again. Pinching me at night. Telling me things.

  She should never have told us to do it. Now look what’s happened!

  Her first thought was that this had been a woman employed at Winterbourne, some cruel professor their father had hired – but then Rachel would come across a troubling entry such as, ‘Why did she make us play such a trick? Now it’s our fault they’re dead, every one of them, dead!’ scratched in a manic hand, and wonder that Constance could be talking about a living being at all and not some figment of her (evidently) rather wild imagination. But who had died? Who had been killed?

  The anonymous pronouns were troublesome. Rachel pondered if the lack of names was less to do with Constance’s familiarity with whomever she was talking about and more to do with protecting the identity of those involved. It was tantalising to be so near to her aunt’s secrets, yet frustrating to be deprived of so many contexts. Constance never needed to qualify her statements. She had no need to explain for the benefit of a reader because she was writing for herself, no one else. But then she would say, ‘I wonder if my diaries will ever be found. What would they make of our wickedness? If you’re there, reader, hello! And goodbye. It is all of it made up.’

  A disturbing thought needled at Rachel: that one of the people at the butt of the children’s ‘tricks’ was Rachel’s own grandmother, Alice Miller. That the asylum hadn’t been the worst of it for Alice. Death had come after. Every one of them, dead!

  Rachel snapped shut the journal she was reading. She forced herself to stop getting carried away. She hadn’t even the facts to suggest that Alice Miller was her grandmother – it was nothing but a hunch.

  Outside, afternoon crept towards evening. Rachel had spent hours immersed in the journals and her stomach moaned with hunger. Folding the book under one arm, she headed downstairs. Had Constance meant for her diaries to be found? In telling the London solicitors about Rachel’s existence, had she hoped it would be Rachel’s hand that unearthed them? Constance might not have thought about the text being read at the time she wrote it, but an old woman at the end of her life, bathed in secrets, afraid of death… The diaries were a confession: Constance’s chance at atonement.


  In the hall, Rachel passed the mirror that she and Jack had excavated from the cellar. It really was a beastly-looking thing. Who had it belonged to? Its ornate frame resembled a drowning girl’s hair, animated in the firelight. Rachel paused in front of it. She looked odd in the glass, not quite herself. Its edges were dappled and a yellow stain crept across the image. Rachel had the impression that she was separate from the person she was looking at, as if they had been peeled apart, as if the woman in front of her could quite easily make a gesture that Rachel, in the real world, had not.

  The thought was ghastly. With some effort, she forced the mirror round so it was facing the wood panels, the reverse of it sticky with cobwebs and a whisker-thin spider that picked its way across threads. As she did, she noticed two initials and a surname carved into the back. They were tiny and could easily have been missed, but Rachel was used to deciphering details on old pieces. The letters read: M. C. Sinnett.

  She frowned. For some reason, a distant chime rang in her mind. She recognised that name, she’d seen it before, but she couldn’t say where.

  As Rachel walked to the kitchen, she felt as if she had left a stranger standing alone, turned to the wall, waiting for her return. She had the sense that her likeness might still be caught inside the mirror. That if she were to return and swing it back round she would see her image as she had left it moments before.

  Rachel fixed a sandwich and ate it without appetite, the diary at her side. The Constance writing this diary was elderly: Rachel knew by the spindly script that spun across the pages, and the book itself couldn’t have been more than a year or two old. Some of the entries were virtually illegible, others appearing to make no sense at all, and sewn into every line was the writer’s aggravation at her depleted state. In clearer moments there were memories of the house, her father, of someone called Tom who lived with the family, and one jotting about ‘him’ (her brother?) that reminded Rachel of the exchange she’d had with the cab driver when she first arrived in Polcreath: something about Edmund being…what words had he used? ‘Gone in the head’.

  She got him in the end, Constance wrote. She sent him mad. She shook him so hard he lost his brains. She whispered to him too many times, horrible things, haunting things, poisonous things that addled his mind and made him wish to follow her. He wished to follow her to whatever dark sphere she had come from and he said the only way he could do that was to do what Mother did… I have spent most of my grown life trying to stop him. And it’s how she got me too, you see, because I had to stay behind to look after him. I could never have found a husband, or had a family of my own at Winterbourne, not with a brother like that. She never wanted me to. She doesn’t want ANYONE to be happy here. Winterbourne is HERS and it always will be.

  And then, several pages on, there was this:

  We are cursed, all of us. I always knew the curse. I knew the curse from when I was a girl. I felt it. I saw it in shadows. At first I thought it was a friend, someone else to play with. But the games it wanted to play were evil. Mother died. Then Christine died. Then Alice died.

  Women. It hates the women.

  Rachel read those lines over and over again. They made her afraid.

  But she hadn’t time to think, because Alice Miller’s name appeared on the line after, and the line after that, pulling her deeper down the rabbit hole…

  Only poor Alice didn’t die as quickly as the others. Winterbourne enjoyed its game with her. It made her believe in happiness and then it made her suffer. It made her and her baby suffer. Father didn’t know at first that I found out about the baby. He didn’t know that I kept Alice’s letters from him. She sent so many from where they locked her up but I didn’t want him to see, so I waited for the post to arrive each day and I took what I needed. It was for his benefit. He already had us. He would never have wanted a baby. I never even told Edmund that. It was mine.

  Chapter 26

  Rachel woke in a chair by the fire, now dwindled to smoking ash. Disorientated, she consulted her watch and saw it was just past ten. She couldn’t recall what time she had fallen asleep. Her hands and feet were numb; one of the diaries was splayed open on her lap. Slowly, glimpses of the previous night’s discoveries drifted into her mind.

  With a stiff neck she leaned in to encourage the fire, stoking the last ember, blowing on it to bring it back to life. At the first flicker she rested another log and listened to it crackle and burn. Alice Miller. My grandmother… For Alice had to be – and the baby she had birthed in incarceration was Rachel’s mother.

  It was a lot to take in. Alice must have suffered such fear and rejection, or seeming rejection, for Jonathan de Grey had apparently never known about the pregnancy thanks to Constance’s wiles. And her baby, Rachel’s mother: had she been loved, cared for, had she been looked after? It seemed vital that she had; Rachel couldn’t bear it otherwise. But the picture she’d carried all these years of her mother as a functioning, well-adjusted woman who simply hadn’t wanted her, a perfectly adequate mother who was able to care for a child (perhaps she’d gone on to have other children?) but just hadn’t wanted this one, was broken. Rachel’s mother had been born into turmoil. She would never grasp the truth of whatever institution Alice had been locked up in. Why had Alice been locked up? What had she done wrong?

  Conclusions pooled in terrifying forms. How Rachel longed for the ghosts of Winterbourne to come alive. How she longed for answers: answers that Constance de Grey’s memories were too afraid to give – or that Rachel was too afraid to read.

  An itch had nagged at the back of her mind since the previous afternoon. She stood and headed up to her bedroom, where she went straight to the little painting on the wall. She stood before it, her arms wrapped round herself because suddenly it felt cold, and she watched that eerie open window in the upstairs of the cottage, half expecting a figure to appear at it, or a hand to have crept insidiously over the sill.

  But the window, as before, was empty: a dark square against a dark night. Rachel’s eyes travelled down to the frame and then there it was, tucked into the corner: the name she’d suspected since she’d turned the mirror around in the hall.

  M. C. Sinnett.

  It was signed in a ragged, virtually illegible hand.

  M. C. Sinnett: owner of the mirror and painter of the cottage. Had this woman lived at the house once? Was she connected to a de Grey? Perhaps she was simply an artist whom the family had admired, and they had sought to purchase her work?

  Rachel frowned and ran a finger across the name. She looked once more at that empty window, the curtain inside it blowing against a murmuring wind, and was so immersed in the impression of solitude and, somehow, deep sadness, that when a battering descended on the door downstairs, she stepped back and gasped in fear.

  Her first thought was that it was Jack, and as she hurried down through the hall to open it she didn’t care to analyse why she hastily twisted the mirror back round to inspect her reflection. What she saw wasn’t good. Her hair was a nest; her smudged eyes were rimmed and her clothes were the same slouchy ones as yesterday, only now they carried a smoky, musty scent that wasn’t just to do with the fire but with the house itself. Oh, she thought, who cared? It was just Jack. But all the same she was pleased to see him, she realised, and would be glad of his company after an unsettling twenty-four hours. She tied her hair back and pinched the skin on her cheeks.

  Rachel opened the door, not realising how much she had lifted at the prospect of seeing Jack until it wasn’t him. It was someone else – someone so incongruous with Winterbourne that he might as well have landed from outer space.

  Aaron Grewal.

  *

  ‘Aaron,’ she stammered. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ he answered, the bouquet of flowers in his arms so huge that it obscured his head. When he was able to get a clear view of her, he struggled to conceal his surprise. Rachel imagined how she must look, in scuffed jeans, a shapeless sweater and no make-up. I
t was a far cry from her image in New York.

  ‘You look great,’ he said, compelled towards the lie because the truth was too flagrant. ‘Are you surprised to see me? Here, these are for you. Obviously.’

  She took the flowers and stood back to let him in. He embraced her, kissed her cheek but not her lips, and gazed up in wonder at the enormity of Winterbourne’s hall.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘This is something else.’

  Rachel marvelled, too, at the arrival of this gleaming man. Aaron appeared artificial, like a 1930s actor superimposed on a beach scene. He wore a crisp shirt tucked into pressed jeans, and his brogues shone like fall conkers. When she went to close the door, she saw a glistening Porsche parked on the drive, and couldn’t help but think of Jack’s beaten up old Land Rover that was filled with dog blankets and chewed up cassette tapes. She took in Aaron’s perfectly shaved jaw and thick, coiffed hair. What had people made of him in Polcreath? Had he been recognised? Then she realised that of course he wouldn’t have come that way. He’d have flown by private jet straight into London, then picked up the Porsche and driven down from there.

  ‘Aaron, I…’ She shook her head. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said again.

  Aaron turned to her. ‘Is that all the welcome I get?’ And he slipped his arms round her waist. She eased out of his embrace. His touch felt wrong.

  ‘Didn’t you get my email?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I did,’ he said, as if it were obvious, ‘and that’s why I’m here. Rachel, I can’t let you go. Not over a misunderstanding like that. I’ve missed you. I wanted to see you. And I wanted to see Winterbourne. I mean, check out this place!’

  It surprised Rachel that he should react in such a way, he who was used to the grandest properties the world had to offer, he who spared no expense in any aspect of his life. Despite the circumstances she felt proud of her ancestry, of her belonging at Winterbourne, as proud as if she were welcoming someone into her own home, which, in a sense, she was. But it didn’t change the fact that her mind was made up.