by Kirsty Ferry
Eventually, Becky looked at her watch. ‘Oh my!’ she said. ‘It’s after eleven. I was supposed to be working tonight. It’s your fault.’ She poked him with her fingertips, slightly tipsy by now. ‘Your fault. I have a deadline.’
Jon waved his hands expressively in the air. ‘No, no work tonight, Miss Jones. Time to relax.’ He smiled at her, not quite focused on her and Becky snorted out a laugh.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said. ‘Very drunk. We need to go to bed. In our own rooms!’ she added, seeing his face light up. ‘Come on.’ She waved the waiter over. ‘Mr Nelson has a room here tonight. Please ensure the bill gets added to his account?’
The waiter nodded. ‘Very well, madam. Which room is it?’
Becky stared blankly at the waiter. ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. She turned to Jon. ‘Go and book your room,’ she said, frowning. ‘The waiter is waiting for your details.’ For some reason she found the comment hysterically funny and waved at Jon as he nodded and wandered off, weaving his way through the tables to the Reception desk. After some time he returned and smiled at the waiter, who appeared again next to the table.
‘Room one hundred and fourteen,’ he said. ‘In the west wing. I need to get my luggage from the car, I think.’
‘You planned this!’ accused Becky. She smacked her hands on the table and sat back. ‘Well! You devious man!’
‘I just thought I’d come prepared,’ said Jon. ‘Just in case. I was a Scout, remember?’
‘Oh! Yes! I loved your woggle!’ cried Becky
‘Ahem.’ The waiter cleared his throat, professional to a ‘T’. ‘If that’s agreed, then, I shall charge the bill to one hundred and fourteen and bid you a goodnight.’ He made Jon sign something and Becky sniggered.
‘You’ll hate me in the morning,’ she said, leaning over to Jon. Then whispered, she thought, quietly. ‘Don’t try to get into my room. I won’t hear you and I won’t answer you. I’m going straight to sleep.’ She nodded sagely at Jon and stood up, rather unsteadily. ‘Thank you for dinner.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Jon. ‘I need my luggage. And I could never hate you. Well, I maybe did hate you when we were kids. But not now, I think. No.’ He shook his head decisively. ‘Not now. You’ve grown up, Becky Jones. I like you better like this.’
‘So you say,’ replied Becky. She picked up her bag and tucked it under her arm. ‘Well, goodnight. It’s been a lovely catch up.’ She clapped her hands awkwardly. ‘And I might see the elusive Elisabetta tomorrow. Hurrah!’
‘Oh, come with me to the car,’ pleaded Jon. ‘It’s a nice night.’
‘It’s not a nice night!’ said Becky as she led the way out of the restaurant. ‘There’s a storm brewing. Thunder. Rain. Everything.’ She threw her hands into the air, her bag almost slipping to the floor. ‘Everything,’ she repeated. ‘No. I will see you in the morning. Goodnight.’ She leaned awkwardly towards him, trying to aim a kiss onto his cheek. Jon was quick, though, and he turned his face at the last moment. Becky’s eyes widened as she realised she was kissing his lips. Then she relaxed as she began to enjoy it.
Eventually they pulled away and Jon, it had to be said, was smirking.
‘Do not come to my room,’ said Becky, waving her forefinger. ‘I need to sleep. And, I repeat, I have no intention of hearing you or letting you in. I shall see you at breakfast. Eight o’clock seems reasonable to me.’
‘Eight o’clock,’ repeated Jon, looking at her wistfully. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight,’ repeated Becky. They peeled away from one another at the foot of the staircase. Jon disappeared through the door into the car park, and Becky turned and walked slowly up the stairs. She paused at the portrait again. ‘Goodnight, Ella,’ she said under her breath. Then she turned up the second flight and headed to her room.
It didn’t take her long to discard her dress, bag and all the accoutrements of civilisation. Within fifteen minutes she was in bed, drifting off to sleep with part of her wondering exactly what Jon was doing at that point in time …
Then, sometime during that night, she had the dream again.
She was in a room, flooded with light. The windows were large and overlooked parkland. Full-length curtains fluttered out into the room, as a summer breeze snaked through the casings. A piano stood in the corner, and she saw her fingers picking out a tune. A piece of paper, ornately decorated and embossed, lay on a desk.
Now she was in the bedroom. A mirror on a dressing table reflected the fireplace and a four-poster bed. She picked up a silver-backed hairbrush and hurled it at the mirror. The mirror shattered, cracks bursting across its surface, obscuring the reflection as a shadow appeared behind her.
Then she ran. She ran out of the bedroom, down the stairs, into the hallway and out of the door. She caught the scent of a storm that was threatening to split the sky open and saw a flash of her blue dress, scrunched up in her hands. She saw her feet steadily pounding across the grass and she prayed that nobody would stop her.
Becky woke with a start, her heart pounding, disorientated. Looking around her she remembered the hotel bedroom she was sleeping in, the staircase she had ascended only hours ago. She squinted her eyes through the gloom, half-expecting to see she was lying in a four-poster bed, but she was relieved to see only the dark shapes of her clothes draped over the chair where she had left them, looking exactly like a figure sitting on it.
She lay down again, cursing the writing slope, the alcohol and most of all Jon for leading her astray, when she realised that she hadn’t actually draped her clothes over the chair. She had dropped them on the floor where she had stripped off. She opened her eyes wide and sat bolt upright. The chair was empty.
WHITBY
Becky didn’t wait until Jon came knocking on her door for breakfast. Eight o’clock found her knocking on his door, her article on Goth Weekend all but emailed to People’s History. After waking up from that dream, she hadn’t managed to sleep very well and had been working on the article from about six o’clock. Her head was fuzzy and her concentration lacking by now, but resolutely she banged on his door, something inside her relishing the idea of being the one to wake him up.
She only waited a few moments before Jon opened the door. She was disappointed to realise that he didn’t look like the half-asleep, unkempt dormouse she had expected, but was washed, shaved, dressed and smiling. He didn’t look half bad, actually.
‘Perfect timing,’ he said. ‘I was just coming to knock for you. Wow, you look rough.’ To take the sting out of his words, he kissed her on the cheek. ‘Good sleep?’
‘No, not really,’ she confessed, waiting as he pulled the door shut behind him. ‘I hope you have your key.’
He waved it at her and put it in his pocket. ‘I do have the key,’ he said. ‘Thanks for checking. What was wrong? Was the bed uncomfortable?’
‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘I was fine until I had a really bizarre dream.’
‘Not about Lady Eleanor again was it?’ he asked, nodding at the portrait as they passed it on their way downstairs.
Becky suppressed a shudder, averting her gaze and trying to avoid the girl in the portrait’s eyes. ‘It might have been,’ she said cagily. ‘She might have been in my room. Just saying.’
Jon stopped suddenly. ‘What?’ he asked, rather too loudly.
‘Shhh!’ hissed Becky. ‘I’m just saying, I thought someone was sitting in a chair in my room last night. I woke up after this weird dream and it was like someone was sitting in the chair.’
‘You should have come and got me. You could have bunked up in my room. Don’t look at me like that, I would have let you have the bed.’
‘I was too frightened to move!’ growled Becky. ‘I couldn’t sleep after that. I put the light on and I wrote my article. Jon, what does she want with me? Am I completely mad or is it re
al?’ She ran her hand through her hair nervously, tucking the stray bits in behind her left ear as an afterthought.
‘In the dream there was a lake. She was heading off towards the lake. And she was in the dining room and the bedroom. It’s like I’m her, like I can see and feel things as her. I don’t like it.’
She paused as they reached the restaurant again, half-expecting the visions to start up again of the piano. They didn’t, although she couldn’t help but cast her eyes over to the corner where the piano should have been. The restaurant, she noticed, now that it was daylight, had the big, tall windows of the dream. She watched the curtains, wondering whether they would billow out into the room suddenly. She stood entranced, lost in that other world, until Jon tugged on her arm. She looked at him, dazed, and he pointed to a table.
‘Come on,’ said Jon. ‘Breakfast, then we’re out of here. I’ll drive us into Whitby. We’ll go to the studio. I assume you’ve got the room for another night?’
Becky nodded. ‘Yes, it’s mine for a few days, actually. There’s nothing waiting for me at home. I might as well be here. I wanted to do some sightseeing.’
Jon snorted; a sound between cynicism and disbelief. ‘You seem to have got more than you bargained for on this break,’ he said.
‘Just a bit,’ muttered Becky. She picked up the breakfast menu, a simple list printed on an A5 piece of card. ‘The coat of arms is on this as well,’ she observed. She sighed and put the menu down. ‘The writing slope means more than we think. I can’t see how it connects to Ella or Eleanor, if indeed it is her who is trying to speak to me. I don’t know who L.J.C. is either. It’s their writing slope, I guess. Someone Carrick, I guess, if it is the Carrick Park coat of arms. I’m clutching at straws.’
Jon lifted the lid of the coffee pot, which had appeared on their table thanks to a small, red-haired waitress, and sniffed. ‘Mmmm, this is good coffee. I’ll ring Lissy before we set off. If there’s an L.J.C. to be found, she’ll find them, don’t worry.’ He poured coffee into the cups and set the pot down again. ‘I’ll ask her to meet us at the studio. She can tell us what she knows. We’ll have to work together on this one I think.’ He flashed the sort of smile at Becky that was guaranteed to make a girl’s heart flip. ‘Just like old times. Can you put up with me a little longer?’
‘We never worked together. You were too annoying,’ said Becky. Then she quickly looked down at her cup and clasped her hands around it so he wouldn’t see her blush. ‘But I guess I’ll have to put up with you for a little longer, as you say it seems like we’re in this together, whether we like it or not.’
‘I actually quite like it,’ said Jon.
Becky looked up quickly, her eyes wide. There was a smile in his voice and he was leaning in towards her.
Honesty, said the little voice within her, adding something else to his attributes. Just go with it, continued the voice. You might just like it yourself.
It didn’t seem to take as long going back towards Whitby in the daylight as it had done driving to the hotel in the darkness. Becky watched, intrigued, as Jon expertly steered the car around the tiny, twisting lanes of the town and pulled up behind the studio. There was room enough for one car in a space marked ‘Private’.
Jon switched the engine off and smiled at Becky. ‘Perk of the job,’ he said. ‘Not all the traders have private spaces, though. I was lucky with this one.’
‘It’s a fascinating old town,’ said Becky, undoing her seat belt. She climbed out of the car and stood in the back lane, sniffing deeply as the salty air from the North Sea infiltrated the cobbled street. ‘I can see why you came back. Plymouth and Sussex are lovely, but you can’t beat the coast up here. Our beaches aren’t as pebbly for a start. That’s partially why I decided to move to York when I finished my degree. It’s got enough about it to be a town, but it’s so close to the moors and the seaside as well, it’s perfect. I can’t see me moving away from Yorkshire, to be honest.’
‘I love it here as well,’ Jon said, smiling down at her. ‘I’m glad you feel the same. Shall we have a coffee first?’ he asked, leading her out of the alleyway and towards the coffee shop they had visited yesterday.
‘Don’t you think of anything else?’ asked Becky, falling into step beside him and smiling back up at him.
‘I think of many things. But I think better after coffee,’ Jon replied.
‘I think it’s probably my turn to get them,’ said Becky, feeling slightly guilty in the cold light of day that she had engineered a free meal last night. ‘You phone Lissy, I’ll go in and get them. Latte?’
‘Please. A large one.’
Becky watched him as she waited in the queue. He was having quite an animated discussion with Lissy on his mobile. The way he was waving his hands around as he tried to make his points amused Becky and she almost missed her turn. By the time she left the shop balancing two cups, he had finished the conversation and was sitting at an outside table, watching the second day of Goth Weekend unfold around him.
Becky sat down opposite and pushed the cup towards him. ‘I still feel under-dressed,’ she said, as a girl walked past in some sort of short, black, lace prom dress. She wore heavy, studded biker boots and fishnet tights and Becky smiled as the girl pulled an iPhone out of her dolly-bag and began to text someone.
‘I think it looks funny, don’t you, when you see the modern world clash with the Victorian one.’ She realised what she had said and suddenly found her coffee cup really interesting.
‘Very funny,’ said Jon. ‘Is that what’s happening to us?’
Becky ignored him and stared past his shoulder at a man dressed as Dracula.
‘Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me,’ said Jon. ‘You’re not that good an actress.’
Becky pulled a face and focused on the man opposite her instead of Dracula. ‘I heard you,’ she admitted, ‘but I don’t know what to say. The only thing I can liken it to is having … her … impress herself on me. But I don’t know why. I don’t know why she’s picked me of all people. Maybe it was the dress thing … I don’t know.’ Her voice tailed off and she shook her head. ‘It’s something to do with the hotel,’ she said eventually. ‘And it’s something to do with the writing slope, but the things we found in there don’t help much. I’m assuming someone liked Mozart. I’m assuming someone liked parties. I’m assuming that, for whatever reason, someone was using or learning finger spelling. I think our Lady Eleanor is this Ella person. I think it was her portrait and her dress Lissy saw, and I think Ella has something to do with Carrick Park. That’s as much as I can piece together and I have no idea who L.J.C. was. Anyway,’ she shrugged her shoulders and sat back in the seat, ‘we don’t know for sure if it is the right coat of arms. That’s the first thing to check.’
‘We can do that straight away,’ said Jon. ‘Lissy said she’ll be about an hour. I’ll open the studio in case anyone is interested in coming in while we’re waiting, and you can see how it all works with the Velcro dresses. If that’s okay with you? You can be my assistant.’
‘Of course, you need to make a living,’ said Becky lightly. ‘It’ll be good fun. And then I’ll write about a day in the life of a seaside photographer. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds ideal,’ said Jon. He stood up and aimed his empty cup into the waste bin. He looked through the window and waved at Lucy the barista, and then took Becky’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get to work.’
They walked around the corner and Jon unlocked the door of the studio. He disappeared and Becky knew he was putting the alarm code in. She headed straight towards the prop table and picked up the writing slope. She peered at the coat of arms, then put the box down and got her phone out. She pressed a few buttons and got the photograph from the wine list up on the screen. She held the phone out next to the slope. The images went in and out of focus as she felt the blood rush away from
her head. She groped for a chair and sat down, still staring at the two items. The silence washed over her again and she knew without a doubt that it was the same coat of arms and that this slope had something to do with Carrick Park. She felt Jon place his hands on her shoulders and she reached up to grasp one of them, trying to ground herself in her own reality.
‘It’s the same one,’ she said. ‘I knew it would be.’ She turned in the seat, looking up at him. ‘That’s the first part of the mystery solved anyway. I hope Lissy is as good at this as you say she is.’
Jon nodded. ‘She is. You’ve gone white,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I will be in a minute,’ she said. She turned back to the slope and leaned over it, feeling around for another secret compartment, another latch that would help her with the mystery; but there was nothing. She shook her head. ‘We’ll have to wait. I can’t do anything else until we have Lissy here.’
Despite her comment, she opened the slope and found the original catch from the day before. She lifted it up and the drawer sprang out again. She carefully took the things out of the slope and laid them all on the table, side by side, trying to work out the connection.
Jon pulled up a chair and took the finger spelling sheet. ‘I’m fascinated by this,’ he said. He put it down beside him and tried to form his fingers into something.
Becky smiled. ‘She’s Ella. Not Etta. Look, you have to spread your fingers out on your left hand like this. Then you touch this part of your palm with your right forefinger. You’ve got your fingers all closed up there, like they’re stuck with glue; and you’ve put your finger here instead of there. Understand? It’s quite clear on the diagram.’
Jon sighed lustily. ‘Okay, clever clogs. Sing this aria,’ he said, thrusting the Mozart sheet towards her.
