Secrets in the Shadows

by Hannah Emery

  ‘I’m so glad that I brought my dad with me to look for you last night. I had a feeling you’d run into that awful man. I’m just glad that we caught him before he … ’ The sentence skulked away, its content apparently unsuitable for the finery of the hotel’s foyer. ‘I know you’d had a terrible shock, Louisa, and so I don’t blame you for doing something silly. But the thing is, you were quite taken with that man before you’d even found out about your poor father, and it was clear that he was bad news. We were all lucky that nothing worse happened to you last night under that pier. You need to be more careful.’ Hatty saw that her father had finished at the reception desk and was heading towards the girls, so quickly wrapped up what she was saying. ‘You won’t always be lucky enough to have somebody to rescue you.’

  Louisa thought of how Dr Barker had rescued her years ago, thought of her father, thought of Mr Kennedy’s gentle grip last night. She looked up from the red swirling carpet, at Hatty’s smooth clean skin and her sleek hair and neat black eyeliner.

  The thing about being lucky enough to always have someone to rescue you, she thought, is being unlucky enough to always need rescuing in the first place.

  It was as they were waiting for the train back home that Louisa saw her.

  She had soft brown hair that hung down over her face, and a rounded jaw just like her mother’s. She stood alone in the midst of all the shrieking groups and families and couples. She held a fashionable rounded suitcase in her hand and her dress was bright, almost garish. She looked, Louisa realised with a creeping nausea, just like her mother would do now. Louisa banged her suitcase down on the platform and raced over to the woman, hearing vague calls from Hatty as she did so. The woman didn’t notice Louisa charging towards her. She stared down the empty platform, lost in her own world: a world that Louisa was certain she had once shared.

  As Louisa reached the woman, she slowed down. She tried to stretch out that last glorious moment when anything was still possible for as long as she could by sidling up to her mother gradually. But closer, Louisa could see that she had been mistaken: that the woman’s hair was not soft, but hung in waves that would be sticky to the touch. As she moved closer still, she could smell a dark, exotic perfume. It wasn’t unpleasant. But was it how Louisa had imagined her mother would smell now?

  Oh, how Louisa had imagined.

  The woman turned, then, and the heavy scent wafted over Louisa, drenching her aching body. All at once, as nausea swept over her and the woman gave her a cool, unknowing glance, Louisa knew: it was not her. With sudden ferocity, the certainty that her mother was dead crashed over Louisa, and all the hot, sharp pain that she had tried to lock away for so many years engulfed her, burning and pinching her whole body. She began to sob: huge, heaving sobs that were too big for her lungs and choked her, twisting air out of her chest and making her shake.

  ‘Louisa,’ Hatty appeared then, grasping at Louisa’s elbow gently. ‘What are you doing? Our train will be here any minute.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave,’ Louisa wept.

  Hatty took a deep breath, a breath which seemed to say I’ve been expecting this. ‘Darling, I know that the idea of going home must seem a little overwhelming. I know how close you were to your father. But there is so much to sort out, and we’re all going to help you. Once the funeral is over, perhaps we could return to Blackpool, if that’s what you’d like.’

  ‘But I need to find out what happened to my mother,’ Louisa said, noticing that she was crying. How long had she been crying for? She couldn’t remember.

  Hatty’s pretty face crumpled into a frown. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Yes. My mother. I lived here in Blackpool with her, before I knew you. She disappeared.’

  Hatty’s features blurred with confusion. ‘Louisa, I don’t understand. You’ve never mentioned living in Blackpool before. I thought that your mother was … well, I thought she was dead,’ Hatty finished in a whisper. ‘I’m worried that you’re confused,’ she said finally, her face suddenly snapping back to perfection. She steered Louisa towards Mr and Mrs Kennedy and spoke conspiratorially into their ears. They looked at Louisa with inclined heads and matching frowns.

  ‘You all think I’m mad, don’t you?’ Louisa wailed. ‘Well, I’m not! My mother disappeared, and I want to know why, and so I need to find the boy with the purple eyes! I know you don’t believe me, and that you think I’m shocked by my father’s death, but the truth is that I knew he’d die, I could see it all in my mind before it happened, and that’s why I came here with you. I knew he’d die after eating his fish supper last night, and I know that the plate he had his fish on will still be in the kitchen stinking the house out when I get home because the maid’s gone now that he has, and I knew that I’d get a visit from the hotel manager, and that I would be wearing my blue dress with the white belt. I knew it all!’

  ‘Let’s get you home, Louisa,’ Mrs Kennedy said. ‘Here comes the train, see, and we all have a ticket to get on it. Perhaps you could have a little nap when we are settled, and then before you know it—’

  ‘You’re treating me like a child!’ Louisa screamed.

  The station stopped. The people stared, their conversations frozen by the hysterical teenager and the possibility of one last Blackpool spectacle before the dreary trip home. Well, Louisa wouldn’t give it to them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

  Mrs Kennedy, her face flushed by the slap of Louisa’s outburst, nodded silently, gesturing for Louisa to step a little closer to the platform; a little further away from her.

  And so Louisa didn’t remain in Blackpool that day. She returned to the house on the hill, now hers, and dealt with papers and letters and stiff visits from people her father had known, and finally it was time for his funeral.

  The first time Louisa met her father, his face was grey and his hands were grey and his life was grey. But slowly, as Louisa grew and ate side by side with him and walked with him and chattered to him about colours and stories and painted him pictures and asked him questions, he began to have more colour. His cheeks became pink with lively conversation, his hands brown from walking in the sun, and his life coloured in.

  Now, as Louisa stood before his imposing coffin, and looked down at his sunken cheeks and that Roman nose she knew so well, and those kind eyes closed in final resignation, she noticed that her father was grey once again.

  Things had come full circle.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nine

  Rose, 1921

  The last heat of the summer had made the train to Blackpool smell of other people’s sweat. Rose could still smell it when they stepped out of the carriage onto the swarming platform. She looked up at the sharp blue sky, wondering if the whole holiday would smell brown and dirty, until her worries were melted away by what she saw.

  Past people’s hats, past people’s faces that were blurred from Rose’s jerky movements through the crowds, and up, up in the sky, was the place she had wanted to see for all of her eleven years. It was just as wonderful as the picture her father had shown her: Blackpool Tower stared down at Rose proudly, calm amongst the hullabaloo of the station.

  Rose, who had only ever been to Scarborough on her holidays, stared up at the Tower all the way to their hotel. She didn’t look at anything else. She tripped over twice and was scolded by her mother four times for not watching where she was going. But she didn’t care. It would take something very, very special for Rose to want to look anywhere except way up above her, to the tangle of iron crisscrosses that stretched high, high up into the sky, to the beautiful peak that floated in the clouds.

  It wasn’t until the middle of her holiday that something very special took Rose’s mind and eyes from Blackpool Tower.

  Rose and her parents had been walking along the promenade, from the north to the south, for what felt like a very long time. Rose kept glancing backwards to look into the sky, and every time she did, Blackpool Tower bore down upon her. The crowds of people m
oved slowly along the promenade, for everybody was gazing at something: the endless roaring sea, or the sands crammed with families, or the fairground rides that soared round and round. The walk to the Pleasure Beach was taking so long that when Rose’s mother spotted a space on a bench, she pulled Rose and her father over to it so that they could all rest their aching legs.

  They had been sitting on the bench, the early September sun blazing down on them, for only a few minutes before Rose’s father spotted a friend of his walking by. Rose’s father jumped up and patted his friend heartily on the shoulder as they exclaimed about the chances of spotting each other away on holiday, and Rose’s mother smiled politely at the man’s wife, who wore a fancy yellow hat.

  As her parents stood and laughed about things Rose didn’t understand, she stared up at the Tower some more. When the sun began to make tiny white dots on her eyes, and her neck became sore, she dropped her gaze and looked along the colourful promenade that was shining with people. She looked at the green trams and the stalls selling salty seafood. She looked up towards The Pleasure Beach, at the row of hotels opposite a man holding some donkeys, and it was there that she spotted the door.

  A tiny handwritten sign above it made every little hair on Rose’s body stand on end in excitement.

  Gypsy Sarah. Fortunes Told Here.

  Rose knew that her mother would scold and her father would frown if she moved from her spot on the bench, but something inside Rose made her stand and wander over to the door. The door was blue, which was Rose’s third favourite colour. Rose pushed at it, wanting to know what was behind it so much that her insides seemed to quiver a little as it gave way.

  Colours and shapes that Rose had never seen before in her quiet Yorkshire life dangled and jingled behind that door. And amongst all the purples and pinks and golds and crystals and gems sat the oldest woman Rose had ever seen.

  Gypsy Sarah’s crinkled face puckered as she saw Rose hovering in the doorway.

  ‘Are you here for a reading?’ she whispered, gesturing to Rose with a hand that looked as though it was made of the brown paper Rose’s dresses were sometimes wrapped in when they were new.

  Rose tore her gaze away from Gypsy Sarah, and turned to see her mother and father still deep in conversation with the people near the bench. She could quite possibly have her fortune told before her parents even noticed that she’d gone.

  She turned back to the room. ‘Yes, please,’ she answered quietly, her words flying out amongst the exotic colours.

  Rose knew little about fortune tellers: she knew little about anything. She did not expect her life’s story to be told, or for Gypsy Sarah to smell of a strange combination of burning wood and lavender and raw meat, or for her hands to be grabbed and squeezed, or for Gypsy Sarah to cry out in a scratchy voice:

  ‘You must find the boy with purple eyes, for he will give you your life! He will give you a gift!’

  ‘A gift?’ Rose asked, intrigued and wide-eyed.

  A gift, Rose thought as she carefully placed every coin of her holiday pocket money into Gypsy Sarah’s quivering hand, as she shuffled out of the shadows of the room and blinked in the bright sunlight, as she sneaked back to her place on the bench and sat as though she had never moved while her parents continued to talk to their friends, as she slept by the side of her snoring mother and father in Room 35 at The Fortuna Hotel.

  Puppies and hair ribbons and books and dolls filled Rose’s mind each time she thought of Gypsy Sarah and the boy with the purple eyes. For what else, to an eleven-year-old girl, could a gift mean?

  Rose thought of the boy with the purple eyes as she was swept along the crammed promenade, as she ran her hands through the gritty beige sand on the beach, as she sat up straight in the hotel restaurant. She looked into the eyes of the boy who helped the man holding the donkeys, of the boy selling oysters in the little white hut, of the boy who was staying in the room next door at The Fortuna Hotel. But she saw no purple eyes.

  On Saturday, Rose bathed in the sea as her parents snoozed on the sand. She paddled at the water’s edge for some time, and then walked out until the water reached her shoulders. Although Rose wasn’t a very good swimmer, she managed to propel herself a little by kicking her legs haphazardly and waving her arms against the cool waves. The water was calm and lulled her gently out to sea. The swarms of people bathing and splashing and shouting became more diluted as Rose moved away from the water’s edge. The silver water blurred around her.

  And then, everything shot into a burst of magnificent colour.

  He was swimming towards her, shooting through the water like a fish. His eyes were not the purple that Rose had imagined. They weren’t a pale, striking lilac as she had thought they would be, but a deep, velvet violet. When he smiled at Rose, she began to tremble and lost her momentum beneath the water. She fumbled, her legs kicking wildly, bitter salt flying into her mouth and making her want to spit and cry out.

  ‘Well! What’s the matter with you?’ the boy giggled, treading water expertly. His voice was a twinkling bell, light with laughter.

  Rose frowned. ‘Nothing’s the matter, you just frightened me.’

  The boy held out his hand, which was brown, and shiny with water. Rose took it, and they moved towards the shore. She continued to kick and the boy pulled her along, so that she moved almost gracefully through the waves.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked as they felt sculpted sand appear beneath their feet.

  ‘Rose. What’s yours?’

  The boy laughed again, his dark face screwing up in pleasure. ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ He stuck out his tongue, then smiled. His teeth, although crooked, looked white against his skin. He rubbed his black hair from his face as they walked away from the water.

  Rose stiffened, and wished that she hadn’t told the boy her name. She felt hard little goosebumps prickle her skin as the sea breeze washed over her, and wondered again what her gift from him might be.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow afternoon, Rose? I have something exciting planned,’ the boy said, wiping his nose with his hand and leaving behind a streak of water on his cheek.

  ‘I’m—’ Rose squinted over to where her parents lay on the sand. Tomorrow was their last day: their train home was at 6.30 tomorrow evening. She thought about how long and bleak the day would seem, knowing that it was their last. ‘I’m not doing anything, really. But we have a train home to catch tomorrow evening, so my parents might want me to stay with them all day.’

  ‘Stay with them all day? But you’re not a baby,’ the boy, who didn’t look much older than Rose, said.

  Rose puffed out her shiny wet chest. ‘No, I’m not. What have you got planned?’

  The boy shrugged and moved closer to Rose conspiratorially. ‘I’m going to sneak into the Pavilion. You should come.’

  ‘On the North Pier? But won’t it be closed in the afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I have to sneak in. If I manage it, we’ll have it to ourselves.’

  Rose frowned as she thought about this strange boy’s plan. She had watched a concert in the Indian Pavilion on the North Pier a few nights before with her parents. It was a beautiful, exotic hall full of blue and green and red decorations that reminded Rose of other worlds, ones she would probably never even see. The Pavilion had been filled with people and perfume and hats and music when Rose had visited. She imagined being there when it was still and quiet, and a delicious shiver coursed through her body.

  ‘I’ll come. Where shall I meet you?’

  The boy leapt with joy, high into the air, and Rose smiled, glad that she had made him happy.

  ‘I’ll meet you on the pier at 4 o’clock. Outside the sweet kiosk. We’ll take some fudge in with us.’

  Rose nodded, wondering what she could tell her parents, and thinking that she had perhaps made a terrible mistake, but before she could change her mind, the boy with the purple eyes had shot off through the crowds.

  At 3.30 on Sunday, Rose’s
mother was folding clothes very carefully back into the suitcase, and Rose’s father was sitting in the hotel lounge reading his newspaper. Rose sat on the bed, swinging her legs forwards and backwards. She stood up, then sat down again. The boy with the purple eyes would be expecting her soon. Rose didn’t want to let him down, and she didn’t want to get the train back home to Yorkshire’s black streets without her gift.

  ‘Mummy?’ she said after a little while, her legs kicking furiously against the bed. She had practised her speech in her head over a hundred times in bed last night, but now that she had to say it, she didn’t feel very confident.

  ‘Yes, Rose?’ her mother replied, as she held up a stained blouse to the light and shook her head.

  ‘I made a friend yesterday. And I’d like to see him again before we leave. He has something for me.’

  ‘I see. I wonder if this is vinegar?’ Rose’s mother lay the blouse on the bed and scratched at the stain gently with her rounded fingernail. ‘I don’t remember spilling anything.’

  ‘So, can I visit my friend?’

  Rose’s mother turned, distracted from the blouse for a moment. ‘He’s staying here, is he?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Rose remembered the boy’s tough skin and long hair, and doubted that he was staying anywhere like The Fortuna.

  ‘Ah!’ her mother said, her eyes suddenly becoming wide. ‘I remember! It’s a wine stain! My glass was a little too full and I spilt some. Well, that should wash out without too much of a problem.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Well, that is a relief. This was new for the holiday. Yes, Rose?’

  ‘Can I go and see him? Quickly?’

  Rose’s mother folded the blouse, and placed it in the case. ‘Yes, yes. But be quick.’

  Rose sped out of the huge front of the Fortuna Hotel, clattering down the wide steps and tearing along the promenade towards the North Pier. She wound in and out of jostling bodies, past the refreshment rooms and the portrait studios. When she reached the end of the pier, she saw the pink and blue sign hanging above Seaton’s sweet kiosk. There were two girls who looked about Rose’s age waiting to be served, and Rose hung back, feeling as though she didn’t want anybody to see her. She watched the girls take their paper bags from the man in the stall, and then looked around her. Everybody seemed to be in a group, bouncing from one person to the next, and Rose suddenly felt very alone.