The Colour of Mermaids

by Catherine Curzon

  Eva squeezed her eyes tight shut. She couldn’t look, couldn’t bear to see the two still figures on the rocks below. But he was safe, wasn’t he? The man she loved. “Daniel… Daniel…”

  She was being hauled away from the edge by strong arms, but there was a hand still in her grip, fingers sticky with blood, but those same fingers were clutching her with all their might.

  “I’m here,” Eva heard him whisper. “Just.”

  At last, Eva opened her eyes. Daniel was as white as the chalk cliffs, his clothes dirtied and his hair stiff with sweat. But he was alive.

  Eva held him, clinging tightly to him as she wept. “Is it over now?”

  She could hear the women telling the tale of all they had witnessed, of Lyndsey and the knife, of her fall, of Daniel’s heroic efforts to save his friend and next to them, there was Mrs Davis, impassive, serene, looking out to sea.

  Then she turned and calmly walked over to the police car, waiting there to tell her story.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Two years later

  Private views didn’t usually offer orange squash and lollies to visitors, but this wasn’t an ordinary exhibition. The artist beamed in front of his paintings as the cameras flashed, and his mother nudged him to fasten his trailing laces. No arrogant bad boy posturing for Kieran at his debut solo show.

  With baby Joanne on her hip, Eva wandered through the gallery, and the children from her outreach workshops waved and loudly greeted her. She grinned at Brighton’s art crowd, who struggled to maintain their poised hauteur as they ate sherbet. How disappointed they must have been when they found out the only available drink with fizz was pop.

  Not that Daniel seemed bothered. He wore black, of course, but this time his shirt was a deep blue and his sunglasses were not over his eyes, but pushed up into his hair. He stood beside Keiran as the flashes popped, both smiling as broadly as the other.

  Daniel Carswell’s protégé, the first to emerge from the charitable foundation established using that undisclosed amount of compensation that the press had reported on so breathlessly. They had catalogued every new twist and turn in the same excitable tone, and some said that it had helped the bad boy to his fourth Turner. He, of course, had made no comment.

  Joanne waved at her dad as if seeing him surrounded by photographers was the most normal thing in the world. Which, to her, it was. Leaving Kieran to his public, he bounded across the gallery, past Eva’s celebrating outreach kids, to his wife and daughter.

  “They want some photos of the lady behind the outreach,” Daniel whispered, offering his finger to Joanne. “Whenever you’re ready. I’ll mind the muse!”

  Joanne grabbed his finger and smiled broadly as she tugged it. Eva hefted her over to Daniel and pressed her lips to the top of her baby’s head. As she watched father and daughter together, Eva wished that Daniel’s mother had been able to see both her son’s success and the family they had created. But her memory lived on in the baby who had been named after her.

  Eva took her place beside Kieran and his mother, and the flashes pinged again. They didn’t make her jump with fright anymore. No one was waiting in the darkness outside now.

  On the sidelines, Daniel and Joanne watched, doing their best to distract her with their waves and silly faces. Eva doubted anyone would’ve suspected that Daniel hid such a playful interior, yet the passion still flowed when they found themselves alone.

  After what had happened, after death and revelations, Eva and Daniel had clung ever closer to each other. They had survived through the nightmares together, through the inquest and the investigation, and the curiosity of the public and the press. The boy who had been erased had been exonerated, and Daniel had reclaimed his name. And despite all of it, despite the wasted years and the drugs and the fear of discovery, he held no grudge. How could he, when all of that had led him here, to his own little family?

  Once the camera flashes had finished, Eva rejoined her husband and her baby. Joanne was no longer interested in either parent and instead gazed at the paintings around them, her young eyes attracted by the bursts of colour.

  “She’s contemplating her own future masterpieces!” Eva laughed. Daniel slipped his arm around her and held her close. He pressed his lips to her cheek and bestowed a soft kiss.

  “I love the pair of you,” he whispered. “My mermaids.”

  Want to see more from these authors? Here’s a taster for you to enjoy!

  The Ghost Garden

  Catherine Curzon & Eleanor Harkstead

  Excerpt

  1925

  The gap between each floorboard seemed to call to Cecily. Drop the ring. But she gripped it even tighter.

  She’d cleaned off the dirt after finding the ring in the rose garden. No one ever went behind the ancient brick walls, and Cecily had only braved its thorns and twisted branches to rescue a cricket ball. The pupil who had accidentally knocked it in there had cried, frightened of a telling-off, and Cecily hadn’t had to go far into the overgrown garden to retrieve the ball.

  And there had been the ring, half-hidden in the ground as if it had risen up through the drought-parched earth just for her.

  Cecily glanced over her shoulder, along the length of the corridor, but Hugh, her husband, was nowhere to be seen. Busy in his study, Cecily supposed as she knocked on the Culpecks’ door.

  The late summer sun was dying, throwing a blood-red tide over the floorboards of the masters’ quarters and she knocked again, keen to be in the cozy confines of the Culpecks’ rooms. Somewhere, someone was tuning a piano and she could hear the occasional sound of leather on willow from the playing fields outside, where school life went on as it ever did, as it ever had since she could remember. She was part of the fabric here, as constant as the buildings themselves.

  “Close the curtains,” Harriet instructed from inside the rooms. “Our circle is now complete.” The bolt slid back with a metallic thud and the door opened to reveal Harriet Culpeck, her yellow summer dress a flame in the gloom. She smiled and said, “I was worried you’d thought better of it!”

  “No, not at all!” Cecily stepped inside. Harriet’s curious glance fell on Cecily’s knitting bag. “Just in case the spirits are quiet, I have a pullover I’m knitting for Hugh, you see.”

  “Graham has a meeting with the headmaster,” Harriet explained as her husband appeared on the threshold of the sitting room, struggling to find the sleeve of his dark gray suit. He greeted Cecily with a warm smile, as different from Hugh as any man could be. “It’ll just be you and I.”

  The headmaster. Never ‘Hugh’, never ‘Mr. James’, always that stern-faced, rheumatoid-eyed headmaster, even to the people who have known him all these years.

  “Good evening.” Cecily nodded. “I hope your meeting goes well.”

  His look was one of sympathy, the same look the world had given Cecily all her thirty years, when the world looked at her at all. Then Graham fastened his jacket over his rounded belly and said, “And your circle of two.”

  “We shall see—perhaps it will be more by the end of the evening. There might be quite the party going on by the time you get back!” But Cecily still clung to her knitting bag. Until the bolt was drawn on the door, she couldn’t trust Hugh not to arrive unannounced. He would be extremely displeased to know that Harriet was holding a séance in the masters’ quarters. And even more so if he knew that Cecily was taking part.

  “We shall be one hour,” Graham told them, holding up his index finger. Cecily nodded an acknowledgment as the clocktower chimed its mournful six bells. When the clock chimed again, the headmaster would stalk along the narrow, dark corridor that led to his study, his black cape billowing at his back. He would descend the wide staircase into the oak-paneled hall and make his way over the courtyard, through the archway and around the path—never over the grass—toward the rooms she shared with him.

  And she must be at home to meet him.

  Harriet presented her cheek for a kiss, then Graham was g
one. She slid the bolt back into place and asked Cecily, “You have the ring?”

  Cecily put her knitting bag down behind the sofa, then held out her palm to Harriet. The gold ring, with its inlaid pattern of white and dark red stones, shone in the dim light.

  “I managed to get the dirt out of the inscription this afternoon—it says ‘My love, my secret’. And then a letter C. I suppose an antiques dealer would know how old it was, but they couldn’t tell us who this C is, could they?”

  Cecily glanced expectantly toward the séance table. Or dining table. She had never been to a circle before but whatever Cecily had been expecting, it hadn’t been a cheery crochet square in the colors of the rainbow, nor a bowl of russet apples beneath the pink lampshade, its tassels blowing a little in the breeze that fluttered the closed curtains. Two stubby candles already burned, settled into green saucers, and a steaming teapot sat next to the bowl, alongside two cups and a milk bottle.

  A milk bottle on the table. She couldn’t even imagine what Hugh would have to say to that.

  “Would you like a tea before we start?” Harriet held out her hand. “Can I see the inscription? How romantic, a ring in a rose garden!”

  Cecily nudged the ring into Harriet’s palm. “Yes, it is romantic, isn’t it?”

  Romance was lacking so entirely from Cecily’s life that she wondered if it was just something made up for songs, books and films, a lie to cling to. Harriet squinted at the inscription and gave a sigh of appreciation before she handed it back.

  “I’ll pour and we can start!”

  Cecily held the ring tight once more. It had become her little piece of treasure, something she wrapped in a handkerchief and kept under her pillow. Hugh knew nothing of it. If he did, he would send it to the auctioneers in Tiverton. But it was hers—the one little piece of romance that had fallen to her.

  She pulled out a chair at the dining table and sat down, her chin in her hand. “I wonder if the C stands for Caroline?”

  “Once we’ve reached your brother, God rest him, we can ask!” Harriet took her seat and poured out two cups of tea. Then she clasped her hands in front of her breasts and told Cecily, “We’ll start with a prayer.”

  Cecily placed the ring down in the center of the table and pressed her hands together. Sitting around the table, she and Harriet looked as if they were about to say grace before dinner, rather than contact the dead. Together they recited the Lord’s Prayer as the candle flames fluttered and the curtains moved gently. Then Harriet reached her hands across the table and offered them to Cecily.

  “We mustn’t break the circle until we’ve said goodbye,” Harriet told her. “Ready?”

  Cecily took her hands. She would grip on for dear life, because what would she do if Sandy got trapped in limbo, or wherever it was spirits went if the circle broke too soon? “I’m ready.”

  Harriet tossed her head to throw her graying copper curls from her eyes, then closed her eyelids. She took a deep breath, then another, and asked in a clear voice, like the dorm matrons ordering the boys into line, “We wish to speak with Lieutenant Pincombe. Sandy. Are you there, or is anybody with us who can call Sandy forward?”

  Cecily stifled a sob. She’d promised herself not to cry, but the thought of her poor brother lying cold in the cemetery outside Ypres for a decade was too much to bear. Though she hadn’t cried when news had reached them that Sandy had been killed. Her father hadn’t allowed it.

  “Sandy, it’s me, it’s Cecily. Please talk to us.”

  The mantelpiece clock ticked on, counting out the empty seconds. The sound of the piano had stopped and, into the silence, Harriet called, “Can anybody come forward? Sandy or perhaps the lady who lost her ring in the rose garden? We’d love to know who gave you such a pretty trinket. Who was C? Were you one of the Whitmores of Whitmore Hall?”

  One of the candles guttered, the flame sputtering and dying as though someone had passed a breath across it. Then it flared again, the wick spitting back into life.

  “Is there a Whitmore with us?”

  Thump.

  Cecily jolted and almost let go of Harriet’s hands. Cautious, she asked, “Is that a footstep, Hattie? What is it?”

  Harriet’s fingers tightened and she gripped onto Cecily as her eyes sprang wide open and her mouth grew slack. As Cecily watched, her friend began to work her jaw as though chewing tough leather, then she asked, “What ring?”

  Yet it wasn’t Harriet’s voice at all, but a rasping, low, male voice. A voice that sounded as though it hadn’t been used in a very long time. It sounded like alcohol and tobacco and a stern loathing that Cecily had heard from her father, just as she heard it from her husband and now from this unnamed, uninvited visitor.

  “Answer me, my girl.” Harriet stared at her, unblinking. “Whose whore are you?”

  “I’m not anybody’s…” Cecily swallowed, her throat dry with alarm. Her voice had become tiny again. “Not anybody’s whore. I’m not.”

  “Don’t take it!” Harriet’s voice was a scream of terror, a woman’s scream, high and shrill. Her hands were so tight on Cecily’s now that her knuckles were white as bleached bone. “No!”

  “Take what? The ring?” Cecily implored Harriet, or whoever was speaking through her. This wasn’t what Cecily had hoped for when she’d agreed to sit in Harriet’s circle.

  “Keep it safe,” the woman’s voice implored. “Keep it from him.”

  “I will, I promise.” Though Cecily had no idea who him was supposed to be. “Is it yours? Are you C?”

  “Shh.” Harriet looked over her shoulder, as though listening for someone. Cecily found herself listening too, her heart pounding at the approach of whoever the woman was so afraid of. The clock ticked again and Harriet leaned forward across the table to whisper. “Isabella.”

  Cecily recognized the name. She closed her eyes, trying to recall where she had heard it in relation to Whitmore Hall. Of course, the memorial inscription on the floor of the chapel.

  Isabella Whitmore, whose earthly remains lye interr’d elsewhere, under her husband’s connstant gaze untill the Daye of Judgement.

  Isabella, the woman whose own husband had tried her and found her guilty of murder.

  A chill rushed through Cecily. Whyever had she agreed to this? Her brother had not spoken, and instead Harriet had managed to dredge up a dark, dark episode from the old days of Whitmore Hall. Long before her grandfather had bought it and turned it into a school.

  “Find me,” Isabella’s voice implored. “And let us rest as one.”

  The candle flames flared again then went out, plunging the room not into the gloomy sunlight that the curtains should allow, but an inky blackness, darker than any night she had ever seen. Cecily willed herself not to move, not to cry out as the hoarse rasp of the man’s voice sounded again and told her, “I am always watching.”

  Cecily shivered. It sounded just like Hugh. Could it really be that Harriet had made contact with the dead, or had she managed to read what lay hidden in the depths of Cecily’s mind?

  “You leave her be, you bully!” Cecily said under her breath. Yet she could be entirely alone in the room if not for Harriet’s grip on her hands. The clock was silent, the birdsong too, and here they sat in this sudden, unexpected tomb, watched by whoever possessed that ancient, cobwebbed voice.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but the door was open,” a new voice said in an accent that she didn’t recognize. For a second Cecily readied herself for a new horror but instead a match sparked into life and the candles were illuminated. As though someone had flicked a switch, the clock resumed, the piano sounded and outside the window with the billowing curtains, a bird was singing.

  Cecily blinked against the light and saw a man in the doorway. She had no recollection of ever having seen him before. He was rather short, an imp of a man, with an uncombed thatch of tousled dark hair and bright blue eyes. He was grinning—beaming in fact.

  And he was handsome.

  Still holding on to H
arriet’s hands, Cecily gave him a polite nod to mask her mounting surprise. “Good evening. And you must be…?”

  “Rafael de Chastelaine. Raf. They tell me you’re having a problem keeping your Latin masters?” As he replied, Harriet sucked in a gasp of air as though she had just been revived after drowning. She released Cecily’s hands, just as she had told Cecily not to do. As she did, Raf took a step into the room and pressed his hand to his crumpled shirt, holding it over his heart as he told the unseen visitors, “Thank you, spirits, for joining us, go safely on your way. Lord grant peace to us and those who speak here.”

  He recited it as though it had been learned by rote, his accent lending the words a strange flamboyance, a world away from the hideous rasp of the spirit. Then he dropped his hand and Cecily realized that the new arrival wore no tie.

  Hugh won’t like that at all.

  “I am so, so sorry!” Harriet settled her wide gaze on Cecily. “Did we get anyone, Cecily? Did your brother come through?”

  Cecily stared at her open-mouthed. “Did you not… You couldn’t hear what you were channeling?” Maybe it was better to pretend. She could tell her that Sandy had said hello, and that he was playing cricket in Paradise with the shade of W.G. Grace. But no, she couldn’t lie to Harriet—she had few enough friends as it was. “A gentleman and a lady came through. He sounded angry. And she said her name is Isabella.”

  Cecily took the ring from the table and held it safely in the hollow of her palm once more. She offered the new arrival a smile. “Sorry.”

  “Did your bro—” Only then did Harriet seem to notice the crumpled Latin teacher in the doorway. She rose rather shakily to her feet and said, “Did my husband let you in?”