Stella stood in the middle of the ballroom and gazed around. It would have been empty, like this, when her mother was here. But fifty years before, when Wilberforce Montgomery had been alive, there had been sparkling lights and music here. And parties and fireworks and strange animals wandering around in the garden. It was difficult to imagine. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling and lay in clumps. Dead leaves were scattered across the floor. There were several large puddles. A cluster of brown mushrooms grew on a windowsill.
They wandered on, in and out of dark rooms. Bulky pieces of furniture were covered with dustsheets, making strange, looming shapes. ‘Billiard room, Turkish smoking room, gun room, Japanese drawing room,’ said Strideforth. He pushed open a door. ‘Here’s the library.’
It was a shadowy room with a high ceiling. The walls were lined with bookcases made of dark wood, carved with patterns of vines and leaves. Overhead was an iron gallery and more bookcases. The shelves reached all the way up to the ceiling, which was painted like the night sky, scattered with stars. The windows were hung with tattered velvet curtains. Some of the glass panes were broken, and tendrils of ivy snaked in from outside.
Strideforth felt a heating pipe and frowned. He rapped it with his knuckles. ‘These ones are hot. Where do they go?’ He peered up at the ceiling. There was a faint humming sound from somewhere overhead.
Stella looked around at the shelves. There were hundreds of books. Some were bound with dark leather and had gold writing on their spines. Some had lost their covers and were just sad bundles of damp paper. She chose one and opened it. The pages were spotted with mildew and black with jagged, foreign print. Perhaps this was Latin, and if she studied with Strideforth, she would be able to read it. She spied a book with a picture of a sailing ship on the spine, but when she tried to open it, she found the pages were stuck together with mould and she could not peel them apart. The next one she chose was full of large holes like a Swiss cheese, as if it had been eaten by something. Perhaps by a large, poisonous invertebrate. Stella shuddered and put it gingerly back on the shelf.
Strideforth said, ‘Do you want to look at the books? I’m going to follow these pipes and see where they come from. I won’t be long. I’ll come straight back.’
The library seemed more shadowy when Strideforth had gone. Stella wound up the musical box, put it on a shelf and opened the lid. The melancholy, tinkling music played as she wandered along the shelves, looking at the books. At the back of her mind, she remembered the sunny nursery again. It was comforting to think of her mother and Letty, here at the house, all those years ago. She found a large volume of sermons, which seemed both difficult and dull, and a book about weights and measures, and one that contained descriptions of battles from obscure foreign wars.
The musical box ran down and stopped, and Stella wound it up again. She found a book of French poems and managed to puzzle out a few words. Steam pipes hissed and clanked. Overhead, something still hummed, like a fly caught in a bottle.
Stella pushed the book back into place and gazed around at the shelves, feeling a bit discouraged. Surely, after travelling the world, Wilberforce Montgomery should have had a more interesting library.
In a dark corner, a spiral staircase led up to the gallery. She closed the musical box and pushed it into her pocket before climbing the stairs.
The humming sound was becoming louder. Stella threaded her way between stacks of books, boxes, piles of paper and other rubbish. She poked into a wooden crate and found the broken pieces of a green egg that must have been the size of a cocoa-nut, the skeleton of a mouse and several desiccated moths.
The humming had become a rattling buzz. Stella reached the end of the gallery and looked at the final bookcase. It held a jumble of books, two cardboard boxes and a dead spider. Cautiously, she opened one of the boxes and found a large, mouldy birds’ nest. The other box contained a collection of decaying seaweed.
Stella stood and listened. The buzzing sound seemed to come from inside the wall. As if an insect were trapped behind the shelves.
She tapped the back of the bookcase. It sounded hollow.
She gave the bookcase a push. It creaked and shifted. From behind the shelves came a frantic burst of buzzing and banging.
She pulled all the books from the shelves, piled them on the floor and examined the empty bookcase carefully. Vines and leaves were carved all around the edges of the shelves. She ran her fingers along the wood. It was smooth and felt slightly warm. Her fingers found a carved snake hidden amongst the vines. It twined around the foliage and its head stuck out between the leaves. She grasped it with both hands and tried to twist it one way and then the other. Something moved. Then there was a loud creak. Stella jumped back nervously. Would it crash down on top of her?
When nothing happened, she shoved the bookcase as hard as she could. It creaked again, and then swung slowly back, revealing a dark space.
A swarm of insects hurtled out in a gust of warm air. They surrounded her head, buzzing and clicking, battering her face with their tiny wings. They flew so fast they seemed like streaks of light. They gleamed like sweet wrappers, green and blue and silver. One hovered for a second. Stella reached out a hand and felt the air prickle. There was a spark and a flash.
‘Ouch!’ Stella rubbed her tingling fingers together.
The insects circled the shadowy library, sparking and hissing like the flames of damp candles. They blundered into the windows and the bookshelves and buzzed around and around the chandelier, crackling with electricity. One of them found a broken windowpane and disappeared into the garden. The others followed. They swarmed around the window, and then, one by one, they darted away through the broken glass and out into the rain. One flew back and buzzed three times around Stella’s head, sending out tiny sparks that made her flinch and blink. It hovered in front of her face, making a high-pitched, clicking sound, and then it darted away, out of the window, and was gone.
Stella rubbed her fingers together again and caught her breath. Her hair felt as if it were standing on end, and the air smelled of burning paper. She peered into the space that had opened up behind the bookcase. What else was in there? It was very dark. Perhaps she should wait for Strideforth to return before investigating.
She remembered a story from A Garden of Lilies. On a trip to the seaside, Maurice, Netty and Obadiah ventured into the mouth of a cave and were dragged into an enormous whirlpool.
Curiosity killed the cat,
And you as well. Be sure of that.
Stella sighed. A Garden of Lilies was very discouraging.
She shoved a box against the bookcase to prevent it from closing, said, ‘Come on,’ to Letty, took a determined breath and stepped into darkness.
Eleven
The narrow passageway was musty and warm. Stella felt her way along cautiously. Wispy, trailing fingers brushed against her face. Her outstretched hands found a tangle of cobwebs. She pushed her way through the sticky threads with a shudder.
The passageway turned a corner, went along for a bit, turned another corner, and then ended. Stella groped around in the darkness and stumbled against steep wooden stairs. She began to climb. The stairs twisted and turned, came to a little landing and led up again. Light filtered down from above.
She reached the top of the stairs and found herself in a small, eight-sided room, lined with crowded shelves. Heating pipes coiled up from below, clanking and hissing and emitting little bursts of steam. The air was hot and humid. Rain pattered against the windows.
Stella looked around. The shelves were crammed full of things. Fossils and huge eggs and strange bones and pieces of branching coral and long, curling feathers and enormous, gleaming beetles. A spindly crab with legs almost a yard long hung from the ceiling, next to a small, stuffed crocodile. There was a telescope and a sextant and a butterfly net and a pith helmet. A dead vine emerged from a large pot, scrambled up the shelves and snaked across the ceiling. Several brown leaves and dry seedpods dangled overhead.
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There were rows and rows of books: Mythical Beasts of Mandalay, Night Creatures of the Feejee Islands, Terrifying Travels in Tartary. A globe of the world stood in a corner. A cage held the skeleton of a small creature. It was difficult to say what it had been. It had the head and wings of a bird and the tail of a snake. In a glass tank was a cluster of large cocoons, and there were several more dangling from the underside of shelves and from the windowsills. Stella touched one gingerly with her finger. It was empty and as dry as paper. Whatever had been inside had hatched and gone.
A desk sat in the centre of the room, cluttered with papers. In the middle lay a fat, leather-bound book. Its cover was so gouged and battered and stained that it looked as if it had been attacked by a savage animal. And then dropped in a puddle. It was tied together with a piece of cord. Stella brushed dust from the cover and undid the knot. She opened the book. On the first page was written, in extravagant, looping handwriting: A Journal of the Ramblings and Collectings of Wilberforce Montgomery.
She turned a few pages and read, I had been paddling cautiously along the shore, when suddenly a huge Crocodile rushed from the reeds as swift as an arrow, with a Tremendous Roar and open Jaws, belching Water and Smoke that fell upon me like rain in a Hurricane.
Stella sat down on the chair. The pages of the journal were crumpled and torn, and Wilberforce Montgomery’s handwriting was old-fashioned and sprawling and difficult to read. In some places, the ink had faded to the colour of weak tea. An account of a visit to a castle in Roumania had been spattered with a dark liquid, and towards the end the only sentence Stella could decipher was, I was Fortunate indeed to escape with my Life. On the next page, he was travelling through a sandstorm in the Sahara. Two recipes, one for boot polish, which included soot and champagne, and another for the treatment of a camel with dropsy, were scribbled onto the back of an invitation to a dance in Timbuktu. Further on, she found a description of the difficulties of bringing home a number of reptile eggs and a collection of tropical plants, including a giant water-lily, in a large tank of warm water. He packed straw and hot-water bottles around the eggs, as the ship in which he was travelling nearly foundered in an icy storm as it rounded Cape Horn. This story ended suddenly, several pages had been torn out, and Stella could not find what happened next.
On the following page was a drawing of a cocoon, like the empty ones in the tank on the shelf.
Travelling through these Islands, I encountered a colony of Lightning Beetles, and despite painful stings and shocks from the Creatures, which displayed remarkable intelligence, I managed to collect several Cocoons. If they survive the journey and hatch outside the Tropics, they will be a Diverting Addition to my Secret Collection.
There was a picture of one of the insects that had flown out of the hidden passage into the library. Stella looked at the empty cocoons in the tank. Clearly, the beetles had survived the journey and multiplied. And now that the furnace was going again, and the study was as warm as the tropics, they had hatched once more, and had been buzzing around the room, trying to escape.
She turned a page, but Wilberforce Montgomery had nothing more to say about the beetles, and was now busy hacking his way through a jungle in Malaya.
Today I traversed the Swamp by the Concealed path, carrying all my possessions as a cumbersome bundle upon my head. The water reached to my neck, and when I emerged, I was Delighted to find my naked body covered in Leeches, and small bloodsucking Fish of an unknown species. I collected several specimens.
Stella giggled. Wilberforce Montgomery continued through the swampy jungle, encountering tigers, vipers, stinging catfish and other dangers. A drawing of a large, fleshy flower with a row of teeth around its centre was spattered with greenish stains. Underneath was written: Savage Corpse Lily.
She read on. Wilberforce Montgomery climbed a volcano in the Sandwich Islands, investigating some strange lights that had been seen in the sky, and sat on the edge of the crater to toast some cheese. He paddled a birch bark canoe up the Yukon River, on the trail of a hairy giant that had attacked a mining camp. He nearly drowned when the canoe capsized and sank in some rapids, and he was stranded on an island in the icy river for several weeks, eating snow and lichen and one of his own boots. He ventured into a pyramid in Egypt and discovered a passageway into a hidden tomb. The doorway was hidden in a marvellously ingenious manner, and opened when I depressed both Eyes of the Carving, which depicted a coiled Serpent with two Heads. There was a drawing of the carved serpent and the hidden levers and weights that unlocked the secret door.
‘Stella! Stella! Where are you?’
She looked up, blinking. ‘I’m here,’ she called. She was startled to see that it was dusk outside. Night was approaching. She had not noticed the time passing at all.
From below came voices and the sounds of people stumbling around, then Strideforth and Hortense climbed up into the room. Strideforth grinned, blew out the candle he was carrying and stuffed it into his pocket.
‘Miss Araminter, she’s up here!’ he called.
Miss Araminter appeared on the stairs. She had cobwebs in her hair. She smiled at Stella. ‘There you are, my dear.’
‘It’s the tower.’ Strideforth looked out of the window. ‘You found the way up. You missed tea. Are you hungry? We’ve been looking all over the house for you. We thought you had disappeared. But then Hortense saw the bookcase had moved. It’s hot up here, isn’t it?’ He touched the iron pipe that snaked along the wall and grinned with satisfaction. ‘There. I knew those pipes were going somewhere.’
‘I think this was Wilberforce Montgomery’s study,’ said Stella.
‘Look at all these things,’ said Strideforth. ‘How did you find the door? It was very well hidden.’
‘I heard buzzing.’ She showed him the empty cocoons. ‘There were insects trapped in here. They hatched because it’s so warm, I think. They flew away into the garden. Look.’ Stella turned the pages of the journal, revealing the pictures of the lightning beetle, the savage corpse lily and the hairy Yukon giant. ‘He was hunting for some very strange things. He brought some of them back with him. He had a secret collection.’
‘A secret collection?’ Strideforth frowned and looked doubtfully at the drawings.
Miss Araminter was inspecting one of the dry seedpods that dangled overhead. She said, ‘My dears, I do believe this is a strangler vine from the Indies, and extremely rare. I know of only one specimen, in the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. It had to be confined within an iron cage after it garrotted a gardener. A fascinating species. How unfortunate that it is dead.’ She gave the vine a pat. The dry leaves rustled.
Strideforth edged away from the tendrils of strangler vine. He tried on the pith helmet. It was much too large for him and came down over his ears. He picked up the telescope, wiped the lens with his sleeve and peered through it. Hortense looked into the jars and tanks on the shelves. Anya squeaked at the bones of the snake–bird creature.
Miss Araminter examined the shelves. ‘A Mandragora root,’ she said. ‘And surely this is an assassin bean. Legendary and certainly extinct.’ She ran her fingers along the books. ‘Carnivorous Seaweeds of the Sargossa. Malignant Wildflowers. All four volumes. What a remarkable discovery, my dear,’ she said to Stella. ‘There are some treasures here.’ She looked around with a smile and rubbed her hands together. ‘It is almost dark. Tomorrow, when it is daylight, I will begin to make a proper inventory.’
‘It’s supper time,’ said Strideforth. ‘Are you hungry, Stella? You must be. You missed tea.’ He lit the candle. Stella took a last glance around the study. Rain pattered against the windows, and outside, far below, the lake glinted in the last of the daylight. She shivered before following Strideforth down the stairs, clutching Wilberforce Montgomery’s journal.
That night, as Hortense slept, Stella sat up in bed and read more of the journal. The musical box sat beside her pillow, gleaming in the candlelight. Wilberforce Montgomery was travelling high in the mountains of
Nepal, through a forest of enormous rhododendrons that was full of bandits and butterflies.
The locals talk of a Flying Serpent, but I have seen no trace of it, and today I was again bitten by many small Monkeys of an unknown species, and a Giant Hornbill of uncertain Temper.
There was a drawing of a huge bird with a high, arched bill. Its fierce, aristocratic expression and beady eyes reminded Stella of Aunt Deliverance. It was strange to think of the Aunts, so far away at the Hotel Majestic. It had only been two days since she had seen them, but already, Stella felt as if they were part of a different world altogether.
She turned the page and followed Wilberforce Montgomery as he strode on through the rhododendron forest.
I have offered the Bandit Chief my Pocket Watch, several pairs of English woollen socks and my last bottle of Finest Gentleman’s Relish, in exchange for safe Passage through the high mountain pass.
Stella followed him up into the mountains, over glaciers, through snowstorms and across perilous, icy crevasses.
Later, she dreamed she was running through the rain, flitting silently along the hedgerows, trying to fade, to become invisible and hide. She could hear the men close behind, shouting to one another, boots thumping. Their lanterns were swinging in the darkness. She ran along the edge of the field, ducked through a thicket, slithered over a tumbledown fence and slipped into the safety of the wood, as silent as a shadow.
Stella woke in darkness, gasping for breath, heart hammering. Raindrops pattered against the window. Henry snored. Outside, in the distance, an owl hooted. She thumped her damp, lumpy pillow into a more comfortable shape, turned over and fell asleep again, clutching the musical box tightly against her chest.
Wormwood Mire Page 7
