Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  ‘Oh, how polite you are, and how awfully short-staffed you find us!’ Lady Simone stated with a small moan of despair. Etta was quick to realise that she had a naturally gloomy disposition. ‘I’m afraid I must leave you to orient yourself. You can do that, can’t you? You have been described to me as a most clever and capable girl.’

  Etta wondered who could have told Lady Simone such things. No one had ever said anything like that about her, although she herself thought it to be true. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll … I’ll work it out.’

  ‘The new apprentice second footman can help you. I’m sure you’ll get on famously.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on that.’ She hesitated, then asked, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen a phonogram around anywhere, have you?’

  A shudder roiled across the bed. ‘Leave me now, child. I feel another spasm coming on.’

  ‘Of course. Yes, ma’am. You can ring if you need me. Thank you for the opportunity!’

  ‘Don’t mention it … please, don’t mention it.’

  As the shuddering of the bed increased, Etta fled. What a spasm was she didn’t know exactly, but she feared it might be contagious.

  In the hallway outside, she crashed headlong into Almanac, who was hurrying past with an anguished expression on his face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked in alarm. Had her trick on Lord Nigel got them into trouble? ‘Are we to be turned away? I’ve only just got my uniform!’

  He faced her with a stricken expression.

  ‘They’re gone! My satchel and clothes – someone’s stolen them!’

  Etta recalled something Almanac had told her earlier about getting changed in a closet. ‘Maybe you just forgot where you put them?’

  ‘I’m certain I haven’t. I never forget anything!’

  ‘Well, don’t fly off at me. I don’t have them!’

  ‘I’m not saying you do!’ Almanac swallowed the sudden fury her question had provoked. ‘It’s just … I had something special in my satchel … and my clothes … and it isn’t fair. They’re all I have!’

  Etta had seen him annoyed before, but not angry. She didn’t like it. His ears had turned pink and his cheeks were completely white. ‘Maybe someone stored them away. Just find out who did it and ask for them back.’

  ‘How? Who am I going to ask? Mr Packer is engaged and Lord Nigel is busy—’

  ‘And Lady Simone is having a spasm.’ Remembering that they might be within hearing of the Yellow Room, she pulled him away and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘What about Doctor Mithily?’

  ‘Exactly! That’s why I’m going up to the East Attic. If we can find her, and talk to her in person so she can’t hang up on us, then maybe she’ll tell us what’s really going on!’

  ‘Okay, wait for me.’

  Not wanting to spoil her best green dress in some dusty attic, Etta ducked into an empty bedroom to change into her new clothes. Her work smock was stiff and formal, not her kind of thing at all, but she definitely looked more the part with it on.

  But what to do with her old clothes, and her mother’s precious hairpin? She cast her gaze about the room, seeking a suitable hiding place for the depressingly small bundle.

  Under the mattress, she decided. No one would come across them there …

  ‘Okay,’ she said, mock-curtseying to Almanac, who had hardly grown any calmer for waiting. ‘Let’s go.’

  In a silent fume, he led the way up the servants’ stairs, to the highest level of the manor that they had explored so far. There, behind a closed door not far from their new bedrooms, they found a narrow staircase leading steeply upwards.

  Etta had lost her sense of direction from all the twists and turns they had taken. ‘Is this east?’

  ‘Yes, I’m quite sure of it.’

  They ascended carefully, feet muffled on the dusty steps. The ceiling was so low that Almanac’s hair brushed against it and stood on end. Behind him, Etta sneezed explosively, once.

  ‘Gesundheit,’ he said automatically, never one to hold a grudge for long.

  Stepping out into the attic at the top of the stairs, he was surprised to find himself under a broad, circular skylight that illuminated the space perfectly. He had expected cobwebs and old furniture covered by sheets but was instead in a room filled with glass tubes and other scientific instruments. Brass gleamed. Silver shone. Mirrors cast slivered reflections at him from all directions.

  Half the room was obscured by a large, foldable screen that was embroidered across three panels with an image of stylised ocean waves. Clothes were draped over the top of it. To one side was a long, low couch that might double as a bed.

  A telephone crouched silently on an antique sideboard.

  Almanac was halfway across the creaking floorboards when, from behind the folding screen, came a familiar voice that made him jump.

  ‘Stay where you are, children,’ said Doctor Mithily. ‘You’ll disrupt the aether. My experiments require perfect isolation at all times.’

  ‘Is this where you live?’ asked Etta, looking around in wonder.

  ‘Yes. My laboratory and home. It is a … suitable arrangement.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s a phonogram in here?’

  ‘Alas, no.’

  Etta saw nothing to suggest Doctor Mithily might be lying. ‘Worth a shot.’

  ‘I’ve come here, like you said I should,’ Almanac said in a tight, controlled voice.

  ‘Yes. And where else have you been?’

  ‘The cellars. Did you send me there to find something?’

  ‘Have you found something?’

  ‘There’s nothing down there but rubbish!’

  ‘Perhaps that’s so … or perhaps not. Isaac, the cellarmaster, used to claim there was a method to his madness.’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me what I’m looking for?’

  ‘You both must discover the truth yourselves,’ she said.

  ‘What truth?’ asked Etta, intrigued.

  ‘What about my clothes and my satchel?’ Almanac felt his anger rising again in the absence of any straight answers. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘I do not know. I have been in my room all day.’

  ‘Someone’s playing a game on us, and I don’t like it.’

  Etta could hear Almanac’s teeth grinding together. Fearful that he might say something to offend the good doctor, who seemed at least to be trying to tell them something, in however small a way, she gripped him tightly by the shoulders.

  ‘Please, forgive us,’ she told Doctor Mithily with a contriteness that sometimes worked on her mother.

  ‘There is nothing to forgive.’

  ‘We’re just a bit confused, you see. I mean, no one came to meet us, and we’ve had hardly any instructions. We don’t know anything about this place, like who lives here, who’s a servant and who’s not. I don’t even know who Sir Palemoon is.’

  ‘You will learn, and when you do, you will know all.’

  Almanac glanced at Etta, perplexed. ‘Sir who?’

  ‘You know. Sir Palemoon. Of the Ruin.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The name of this place, you goose. Surely they told you! Didn’t you at least see the sign on the gate? Sir Palemoon’s Ruin?’

  ‘I did see the sign, but it said Spoilnieu Manors.’

  ‘“Manors” as in more than one? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I know what I saw!’

  ‘Well, we can’t both be right.’ Etta turned back to the screen. ‘Doctor Mithily, tell him!’

  ‘I can tell you this,’ said the hidden woman. ‘Both of you are right and both of you are wrong.’

  ‘Gah.’ It was Etta’s turn to be annoyed. She hated riddles until they were solved. ‘You’re no help at all.’

  ‘I suggest employing the scientific method,’ Doctor Mithily told them. ‘Find the other house or find the ruin. Or, simpler still, inspect the sign itself. Then you will know. Begone, now. I have experiments to attend to.’
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  ‘What does the sign matter, anyway?’ said Almanac, wanting to get back to the mystery of the whereabouts of his personal belongings.

  ‘Don’t you know anything?’ Etta said in a snappish tone. ‘Names are words, and words can be magic. That’s why every sorcerer changes their name when they graduate to protect them from magical attack. If you’re seeing the name on the sign wrong, there must be a reason. We just have to work out what that reason is, and if it’s connected to the spell.’

  ‘I’m not seeing it—’ He swallowed another sharp retort. She was right, he supposed, about names being important. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing his carved soapstone pendant, after all. ‘I just want to find my things.’

  ‘And I want to find the phonogram,’ she said, ‘but Doctor Mithily’s giving us a hint, and I’m going to follow it. I’m not going to sleep a wink until I know for sure there’s not a spell on us! Are you coming?’

  ‘Where to, exactly?’

  ‘To look at the sign, of course!’

  He hesitated, wondering how far he should follow Doctor Mithily’s advice and her strange whims.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But then let’s let drop this, shall we?

  ‘It’s so obvious you’re afraid you made a mistake,’ she said as they descended the stairs.

  ‘I’m not! I didn’t!’

  ‘You’re not fooling anyone, you know … ’

  ‘Good luck, children,’ whispered Doctor Mithily when they had gone. ‘You poor, poor children … ’

  They kept arguing over the name of the house until they reached the front door. There, both remembering what had happened to them the first time they had passed through it, they fell silent and trod over the threshold with care. The strange sensation did not recur, however, which left them both simultaneously puzzled and relieved. Could Etta have imagined the magical attack? Might they both simply have tripped, as Almanac had assumed he had done? He didn’t think that likely … but there was nothing to be done about that now. They had other avenues to explore.

  Side by side, they followed the path that wound through the orchard of ancient walnut trees towards the distant gate. Shadows reached long across the ground. It seemed days since Etta had trod towards the house in the other direction, eager to arrive but uncertain about her new life too. What if her new employer didn’t like her? Demonstrating her worth at Sir Palemoon’s Ruin had been the number one thing in the world to her.

  It still was, she told herself. Wasn’t it?

  ‘Tell me, what’s in that satchel of yours that’s so important?’ she said to Almanac.

  He described the pendant that his friends at the orphanage had given him. This led to a surprisingly heartfelt account of his former life. He was surprised to realise that a part of him already missed his old home. Maybe just the part that loved rules and order, but a part nonetheless. The knowledge that the mistress was no longer running his world was only slowly sinking in.

  People who left an orphanage never went back. That was the one rule he knew for certain about the outside world.

  The only sound for a long moment was the crunching of the gravel under their feet. Etta was thinking of her own home too, her mother, and her many sisters, and wondering if they had even noticed she was gone.

  ‘We could just leave,’ she said, startling Almanac.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go somewhere else. Far from here.’

  ‘But where? And why?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She shrugged, feeling hungry and exhausted. ‘Because they haven’t made us feel very important or even welcome here, have they?’

  ‘But we only just got here! We can’t leave yet. That is, you can—’

  ‘I haven’t said I am going,’ she said, ‘just that we could.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s true. And we could look for jobs somewhere else.’

  ‘Exactly! I passed through three villages on the way here. Someone must need a chambermaid and a second footman.’

  ‘But I can’t leave without my satchel and clothes. And it wouldn’t feel right. Mr Packer and Lady Simone offered us jobs, and we took them. That’s like making a promise, isn’t it? We can’t break a promise.’

  She might not have agreed with him on that point, having interpreted even solemn oaths to her sisters rather loosely when necessary, but the wall had come into sight and her train of thought, ever capricious, was knocked back on its former course.

  The wall surrounding the estate was tall and thick, made of heavy, grey stone with a crenelated top, like a castle’s. The gates were equally impressive, wrought from iron with gilt flourishes and fierce-looking spikes at the top. They had been open before but were swung closed now, and both children could see that the metalwork formed a coat of arms featuring several winking lions with tails curled in flowing S’s. It looked very impressive, which Etta supposed such things were intended to do.

  The sign that would settle their argument lay on the other side of the gates.

  ‘Sir Palemoon must have been careless to let his estate run down so badly,’ she said. ‘I mean, ruins – just think of it!’

  ‘Not to mention Spoilnieu losing one of his manors,’ he shot back, acknowledging the effort at funning with him by returning it. ‘Assuming he even existed.’

  ‘Ha! Well, we’ll soon know.’

  ‘I guess so. Race you!’

  They came at a draw to the base of the gates, panting lightly. Each took one side and pushed.

  The gates rattled in metallic tones but remained firmly shut.

  ‘Let’s try again,’ said Almanac. ‘The hinges might be stiff. They look a bit rusty.’

  Once more they pushed, this time so hard that veins stood out on Etta’s forehead.

  But the gates didn’t so much as sway.

  ‘Locked, you’ll find,’ called a voice from behind them in a rustic accent.

  They spun around. A figure was moving through the undergrowth beside the path, a bushel of straw slung across his shoulder. His face, indeed most of his body, was obscured by shadows, but there was a hitch to his step that looked familiar to Etta.

  ‘I know you. Didn’t I see you earlier?’

  ‘That you did,’ he hollered over his shoulder. ‘I’m Silas, the gardener. Been working this land, oh, longer than I can remember! Part of the place now, I imagine.’

  ‘Can you open the gates for us?’ asked Etta. ‘We just want to check the sign outside.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, young miss. The gates will stay locked until they’re needed to be opened again.’

  ‘Who says so? Lord Nigel?’

  ‘You might say so.’

  ‘Couldn’t you ask him for the key?’

  ‘Dear me, no. He’s a right terror, as I’m sure you’ve discovered by now.’

  Etta looked up along the bars of the gate to the spikes at the top. There would be no climbing that, not easily, and neither could she see a way over the wall, which stretched out of sight to either side of them. All the walnut trees were planted well away, and Silas had carefully pruned back any wayward boughs.

  ‘So we’re stuck in here,’ she fumed.

  ‘So it would appear.’ Silas chuckled. He was barely visible now, a shadow amongst shadows, as he moved further away from them.

  ‘Why close the gates at all?’ asked Almanac.

  ‘A good question, young master! A rule’s a rule, I suppose, and where would we be without them?’

  Almanac blinked and lost sight of him.

  ‘Silas, wait!’ called Etta, struck by a thought. ‘Can you show us the ruin?’

  ‘Or perhaps another manor?’ added Almanac.

  They called Silas’s name several times, but no answer came from the thickening shadows.

  ‘You know, we could hunt for the ruin on our own,’ Etta said, without conviction.

  ‘We’ll lose the light in a moment. What if we got lost?’

  ‘You’re just saying that because you know I’m right about the name.�
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  ‘I’m not. Honest.’

  ‘You’re “not honest”? I knew it!’

  ‘No, I mean – oh, I get it. Ho ho.’

  ‘Let’s walk the fence line to see if there’s another way out. We won’t get lost if we follow the fence, no matter how dark it gets.’

  She headed off, racing the day’s end, and he hastened to catch up with her.

  ‘Does it seem weird to you that we never properly see anyone?’ she asked.

  Almanac thought of Silas vanishing into the trees and Doctor Mithily behind her screen, and the others who were engaged or busy or having a spasm.

  ‘Definitely,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘Maybe they’re really ugly and they don’t want to scare us off?’

  ‘Brrr.’ She hugged herself, feeling a chill that owed more to its existence than the gathering night. ‘Somehow that only makes it worse.’

  ‘Forget I said anything.’ He looked around them, feeling as vulnerable as she did. Hopefully they would be back at the manor soon. Full of mysteries it might be, but it would be warm inside, and they would have beds of their own to look forward to at the end of their toils. Hopefully there would be food too, because now he also was hungry, a yawning, gnawing kind of hunger that he had often experienced in the orphanage, during the long wait between morning and evening meals.

  ‘What was the name of your village?’ he asked Etta.

  ‘Holsworthing,’ she said. ‘You’ve probably never heard of it.’

  He admitted that he hadn’t. Neither did she know of his orphanage, One Heart Guidance Home for Boys. That only made them feel lonelier. They were strangers in a strange place, flung together and now trapped together.

  ‘We’ll find your satchel, I promise,’ she told him, taking his hand for comfort in the gloom. This time, he managed not to go all awkward and pink as though she had asked him for a dance in the village green.

  ‘And find your … what was it? Phonogram? Beats me why, but that’s what we’ll do.’

  Etta warred with herself for a moment. Then, deciding she had no reason to mistrust him any longer, she told him about the directions Doctor Mithily had given her over the telephone. True, she hadn’t said that Etta would definitely find a library that way, but it was the only lead she had.