13 Curses

by Michelle Harrison

  Red hesitated, then crawled out of her hiding place. As she rounded a tall dresser, the owner of the voice came into view. Before a beautifully crafted doll’s house sat a little girl of about seven, clutching a doll to her chest, her eyes wide. She relaxed as Red came into view, and her expression changed from one of fear to one of wonder.

  “A fox!” she whispered. “How did you get in here? Daddy doesn’t like foxes.”

  Red stayed still, wondering whether to speak. If she did, there was no telling what the child might do. But she had to find out who this child was… and what she was doing in the house in the first place. Tanya had never mentioned any younger relatives at the manor, and Florence didn’t look the type to keep small girls in the attic.

  “I won’t hurt you,” the little girl breathed. She was sitting very still, as though scared that a movement might frighten Red away. Her clothes were a little old-fashioned, Red saw—a blue pinafore dress and white stockings—and her brown hair was curled and tied in ribbons. A strange little warning was starting to tap in the back of Red’s mind. Something wasn’t right here. She decided to take a chance.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  The child’s eyes widened again, but she did not look as surprised as Red had anticipated. She gave a little laugh.

  “You can talk! Are you a magic fox?”

  Red went a little closer.

  “Sort of. There’s a spell on me—I’m really a girl… just like you.”

  “A spell? What happened?”

  “A witch made this coat of fox fur,” said Red. “It’s enchanted, and it’s turned me into a fox.”

  The child tugged at one of her curls.

  “I know someone who can change into a bird,” she said.

  “Really?” said Red. “Who?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” said the child. “She’ll be cross.”

  Red stayed silent. An odd thought had just occurred to her.

  “A bird, you say?” she asked eventually.

  The girl nodded.

  “Is it a big, black bird?”

  Another nod.

  “A bird called… Raven?”

  “You know her?” the little girl asked in surprise.

  “Yes,” said Red, her blood chilling as her suspicion was confirmed. “So that must mean that you’re… Florence.” She took in the girl’s old-fashioned attire once more, trying to make sense of it all. Fabian had just seen Florence come back to the house—so how could this apparition of her in her childhood be in the attic?

  “How long have you been here?” Red asked.

  The child Florence shrugged.

  “A long while. It feels like forever.” She reached into the doll’s house and placed her doll carefully into a seat at a dressing table. And there, on the dressing table, an object caught Red’s attention. It was a miniature silver goblet. Immediately Red knew that this was not just any goblet, for there was a tiny hole in its base, a hole where a link should be. It was one of the bracelet’s charms: the Goblet of eternal life.

  “What’s your dolly doing with that funny old goblet?” Red asked, trying to sound casual—but her heart felt as though it were beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.

  “She has to hide it,” said Florence. “It’s a priceless treasure from a smugglers’ cave—but the smugglers know she stole it and they’re after her.”

  “Where’s the rest of the treasure?” Red asked.

  “It’s in the garden,” Florence said in a confidential whisper. “Buried where X marks the spot at two.” Snapping out of the fantasy suddenly, she turned back to Red. “Can I stroke you? I’ve never touched a fox before.”

  Red moved closer. All the while, she kept her eye on the charm, and allowed Florence to pat her head. It was a strange feeling, she thought as Florence scratched behind her ears, to be fussed over by a child.

  “You’re not soft, like our dog,” Florence was saying. “You feel rough and scratchy.” She giggled, and with her distraction Red took the opportunity to lunge into the doll’s house and snap the Goblet charm in her jaws. Then she twisted out of the little girl’s reach, scampering through the attic to the staircase.

  “What are you doing?” Florence called after her in alarm. “You can’t take the charm…. I’ll get told off if I lose it! Wait, come back!”

  Red did not stop until she reached the bottom of the staircase. The metallic tang of the charm was strong in her mouth. In the darkness she fumbled with the catches on the coat and threw it to the floor. Once back in her human form she reached into her pocket and pulled out the bracelet, then spat the charm into her other hand. With fumbling fingers she held the Goblet to the chain. It reattached itself at once, and from the attic, the little girl’s voice stopped.

  Cautiously, Red crept back up the stairs and went through the dusty attic. This time, there was no candlelight, and when she reached the doll’s house its front was closed and blanketed with gray dust. Nearby, a charred candle stump was draped in cobwebs. There was no sign of Florence, or the game she had played with her dolls as a child. It was just a dusty old attic full of things that were once loved, but now forgotten.

  Red went back down to the Elvesdens’ room.

  She had not been there long when a creaking noise came from the staircase. Someone was outside the room. With no time to put the fox-skin back on, she grabbed it and rolled under the bed, the door just visible from under the bedclothes. A pair of sneakers came into view. She relaxed and crawled out from her hiding place. It was Tanya.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  Red held the bracelet up.

  “I found the Goblet.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In the attic… with an apparition of your grandmother as a child.”

  Tanya stared at her in confusion.

  “Florence took the charm off the bracelet and pretended it was stolen treasure as a child. She played with it in her doll’s house.”

  “But what do you mean there’s an apparition of her in the attic? An apparition is a ghost, isn’t it? How can that be true if she’s downstairs right now?”

  “Think about it,” said Red. “The Goblet’s power is eternal life. It’s as though the twisted power of the charm opened that small window in Florence’s childhood and let it play out. As soon as I attached the charm to the bracelet, she vanished.”

  “But if you hadn’t found her, she might have been left up there forever,” said Tanya, biting her lip. “Each time we find one of the charms it seems to get more dangerous. It’s like they’re gaining power all the time.” She paused and looked about the room. “I can’t believe you didn’t find anything here. I really thought there would be some kind of link.”

  “So did I,” said Red. “But one thing your grandmother said—I mean, the child version of your grandmother—was that the rest of the ‘treasure’ had been buried in the garden as part of her game. I think that might be another hiding place. And if I have my coat on, it means I can search the garden undetected.”

  Tanya nodded—but she seemed distracted and was still looking around the room. “You searched the painting, then,” she said, eyeing the portrait, which was on the mantelpiece, leaning against the chimney.

  “It was a dead end,” said Red. “I thought a charm could be hidden behind it, perhaps.”

  Tanya hesitated.

  “What if… oh, never mind. It’s a stupid idea. Come on, let’s go.”

  “No, wait,” said Red. “No idea is stupid. What were you going to say?”

  “One of the treasures is the Halter… the ring that makes the wearer invisible,” said Tanya slowly. “Maybe we can see it… but we’re not meant to realize it’s there. Can I have the bracelet?”

  Red handed it over, watching as Tanya went over to the fireplace and stood before the portrait, her eyes fixed on the painted bracelet. Lifting the real bracelet up to the flat canvas, she brushed it so that it touched the area where the ring was painted.
/>   They both heard the distinctive linking noise. When Tanya brought the bracelet back down, a sixth charm had attached itself to the chain.

  “You were right,” said Red, quietly. “The ring was invisible… yet visible all at once.” She put the bracelet back into her pocket. “Come on. Help me get this thing back on the wall, and then let’s get out of here.”

  After the discovery of the latest two charms, Red spent the afternoon in the back garden searching for the spot in which a little girl might hide her pretend treasure. Concealed in her fox-skin, she was able to scour the overgrown garden without the worry of being seen. A couple of times she even saw the goblin, Brunswick, come in and out of his little abode beneath a holly bush, and both times he was singing a little song to himself.

  Try as she might, however, she saw no sign of a place marked with an X. She searched high and low, scouring tree trunks in case they had been engraved, and large stones, and even the ground itself. There was nothing. If Florence had left a mark as a child, more than half a century before, it now appeared to be long gone and Red felt foolish to have hoped that it would have remained.

  It was an overcast day, with occasional bursts of sunlight breaking through thick cloud. Every so often, Red saw Florence at the kitchen window, staring out toward the woods as if in search of answers. She was looking older by the day, and was noticeably distracted by Warwick’s absence.

  Red had agreed to wait for Tanya and Fabian to come out in the afternoon when they took Oberon for his walk by the brook. This would provide them with a chance to discuss their next steps, without being seen or overheard.

  When they finally appeared, Red was waiting underneath a bush near the garden gate, and they quickly exited the garden and headed away from the house. When they reached the brook, they sat down, tossing sticks for Oberon to fetch until he was exhausted, throwing himself down and panting next to them, grass stuck to his long, pink tongue. Red cast off her fox-skin coat, relieved to be out of it once more, and Oberon gave a little yap and proceeded to sniff at the coat with interest.

  Tanya and Fabian had been busy. Fabian took their notes out from under his coat, and weighted them with stones on the grass in front of them. His glasses were smeary and speckled, and his hair more bushlike than ever. Clearly, his missing father was troubling him deeply.

  “The more charms we’ve found, the more clues they’ve given us to the whereabouts of the others,” he said. “We’ve gotten several leads from the diaries as to possible locations, but we need to think logically about how realistic some of them are.”

  “And how we’d be able to get to them,” said Red. “The asylum Elizabeth died in is going to be a problem—if it’s even there still. How on earth would we get into a place like that?”

  “We don’t need to,” said Fabian. “That’s my point. The asylum seems an obvious place, but in reality, I don’t think the bracelet was ever there. They don’t tend to allow personal belongings like that in those sorts of hospitals. It would have stayed here, at the manor.”

  “So we can probably strike that off our list,” said Tanya. “If our options run out, we can go back to it.”

  “The other thing is that the diaries that are still missing seem to be from Elizabeth’s time there,” Fabian added. “Florence once said that Elizabeth had the diaries brought back secretly by the maid she trusted, but they were intercepted by Lord Elvesden and destroyed. Even so, if we work to the theory that the bracelet was never at the asylum, then we don’t need to worry about the missing diaries.”

  “What else?” Red asked.

  “I’ve traced the location of Elizabeth Elvesden’s first home,” said Fabian. “The cottage she lived in with Miss Cromwell when Lord Elvesden first gave her the bracelet. The cottage is still there in a village about twenty miles from Tickey End. We could take a bus, but it would take a whole afternoon to get there and back—and of course we’d need a plan for getting into the house.”

  “We’ll think of something,” said Tanya.

  Fabian nodded.

  “If the clues are anything to go by, I think one of the charms might be in the underground tunnels that Elizabeth used when she tried to escape from the manor. The bracelet broke and fell off when she was down there in the darkness.”

  “It’ll be dangerous,” said Red. “Maybe even impossible to reach—I’ve been down there, remember? Some of the tunnels have collapsed.”

  “It gets worse,” said Fabian. “Because think about what happened next, after she ran away.”

  “Well, she died shortly afterward, didn’t she?” Red asked.

  Fabian nodded. “And it was buried with her—the last significant thing to happen to it in Elizabeth’s lifetime.”

  Red felt her stomach turn.

  “You think one could be in the grave, don’t you? We’re going to have to dig her up.”

  “It’s not like she’s going to mind,” said Fabian, although he looked as uncomfortable with this prospect as she felt. “She’s been dead for two hundred years. And if it helps bring my father back home, then I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”

  “I’ll do it,” Red said grimly. “Neither of you needs to get involved. Just tell me where the grave is.”

  Fabian looked over toward the church.

  “You can’t go now, it’s broad daylight. You’ll be seen.”

  “Obviously,” said Red, her voice scornful. “I’ll have to go at night.”

  Fabian ignored the comment.

  “The grave is one of the grandest in the churchyard,” he said. “A huge stone slab in the center of the cemetery, next to an identical one where Elvesden was buried. You can’t miss it.”

  “You’ve got that wrong,” Tanya objected. “I went to her grave in the summer with my grandmother and there was no slab. It was a headstone, and it wasn’t in the center of the graveyard at all—it was right at the edge, over that way.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fabian snorted. “I know where it is.”

  “Clearly, you don’t,” said Tanya, also getting annoyed. “I just told you—I was there. I saw her name. We left flowers.”

  “Come on, then.” Fabian jumped up. “Let’s settle it.”

  On the way over to the churchyard, Red told them about her search of the garden.

  “There’s no X,” she said. “I’ve hunted high and low and there’s nothing. I don’t see a way of finding out where Florence kept her imaginary treasures.”

  “Unless we question her,” said Fabian. “But in a way that she won’t figure out what we’re doing.”

  When they reached the church, Fabian led them through the maze of graves to two stone slabs, just as he’d described, in the center of the graveyard. They were overgrown, but he knelt and brushed aside the trailing ivy to reveal the two names side by side: Edward and Elizabeth Elvesden.

  “See?” he said smugly. “I was right.”

  Tanya stared at the name in front of her in disbelief.

  “That’s not right,” she said. “It can’t be. I remember. Let me show you!” She headed off determinedly, despite Fabian’s protestations, to the edge of the graveyard.

  Red stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the grave. She recognized the grave; she was sure of it. Scanning the surroundings and the nearby church, she did a quick lap of the graveyard as Tanya and Fabian moved farther away, then she arrived back at the spot she had started. It was the one, as she had suspected. Looking up, she saw that Tanya was waving at her, and so she jogged over to meet them.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Fabian was saying. “There must be two people with the same name!”

  Tanya pointed to the worn name on the stone. ELIZABETH ELVESDEN.

  “This is the one my grandmother showed me. Not the other one.”

  “Then what is that one?” said Fabian. “How can someone have two graves? Why would someone have two graves?”

  “Because only one is real,” said Red. She nodded to the one in the center of the graveyard. �
��And it’s not that one.”

  “How do you know?” Fabian demanded.

  “You remember what I told you in the summer?” said Red, looking at Tanya. “How I got into the house when I was hiding out?”

  “A grave,” said Tanya. “You said you got into the tunnels by a fake grave.”

  “Right. And guess which one it was?”

  All three of them stared back into the churchyard.

  “That’s the fake grave?” Fabian said.

  Red nodded. “I didn’t remember the name, just the location of it and some of the decorations. It’s quite lavish, not like this one.”

  “This one is a lot simpler,” said Tanya.

  “And it looks newer,” said Fabian. He was quiet for a few moments, scuffing the earth with the toe of his shoe. He looked at the grave, then back at the churchyard, then to the grave again.

  “Notice how it’s a little way out from the others?” he said eventually. “There are only a few this far out from the church. And there, look.” He gestured to a small area of a crumbling stone foundation at ground level that divided the land into two. “See it?”

  “What is it?” said Tanya.

  “It looks like the remains of a wall,” said Red. “But then that would mean that a few of the graves were outside of the churchyard.”

  “Weird,” Tanya added. “The graveyard couldn’t have been full, because Edward Elvesden died after Elizabeth, and in any case it looks like their graves were plotted many years before their deaths. Some people still do that, don’t they?”

  “I’ll tell you why she was outside the churchyard,” said Fabian thoughtfully. “And why the gravestone is new. It’s what they used to do to people who were thought of as sinners in the olden days. They were buried in unmarked graves on unconsecrated ground. Elizabeth Elvesden was thought to have dabbled in witchcraft.

  “It was only more recently that anyone thought to mark her resting place with a stone. The grave within the churchyard is just to save face. At the time, no one would have known that she was really buried here, all along.”

  “So she was just thrown in the ground, with nothing to say who she was?” said Tanya indignantly.