Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  ‘Okay,’ she said, albeit with lingering uncertainty. ‘Let’s keep mum until we know for sure. But then we tell them. Because we must. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’ He sagged a little, thinking of the spooky cellars awaiting him. Just because he hadn’t seen any ghosts down there yet didn’t mean there weren’t any. Isaac’s, possibly. He wasn’t reassured by Etta’s all they are is what’s left when a person’s body is gone talk. People could be mean, so ghosts could be mean too. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to trade jobs?’

  ‘Absolutely positive,’ she said, then relented, seeing his face fall. ‘But maybe we could just for tomorrow, if it’ll make you feel better.’

  Almanac, torn between relief and guilt, didn’t know what to say. ‘Do you mean that?’

  She did, despite every lesson she had learned from being the youngest of twelve children. No one volunteered for chores they didn’t want. That was madness. But maybe, if it put Almanac at ease for day, this would be a worthwhile exception.

  In the warmth of the kitchen, as they sat wrapped in towels while their wet clothes dripped dry, Ugo smugly declared that they had wasted their time chasing Madame Iris. Almanac had almost forgotten where their recent adventures had begun.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ Ugo said. ‘She does not talk much, and what she says is not worth listening to.’

  ‘So she does talk, then?’ asked Etta, not sure how she felt about discussing anything with someone who might be dead, no matter how friendly they seemed.

  ‘On occasions.’

  ‘What does she say?’ asked Almanac, no less discomfited than Etta. Did ghosts know they were dead? Was it rude to even raise the issue?

  ‘She talks only nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. Ignore her next time. Say you will.’

  They promised nothing. Etta had no intention of doing anything other than what she thought correct at the time, and Almanac hoped that the point would be moot very soon.

  The next day Etta was confronted with piles of stinking rubbish, wondering what in blazes she had been thinking when she’d agreed to work in the cellar. Above ground, the manor was all respectability and order, while below ground it was ugly chaos. Almanac had made considerable advances, but there was so much mess remaining. It seemed impossible that one person could clear it alone, even with the help of the shovel they had retrieved from the garden shed and the makeshift wheelbarrow.

  There was no use dwelling on it, though. This had been her idea, after all, and the cellar wasn’t quite so spooky now she had scattered seventeen silver candelabras to press the shadows back into the corners.

  ‘It’s only one day,’ she told herself, tying up her pigtails and hefting the shovel.

  The pipes banged as though in encouragement, but Etta didn’t have the knack of Olive’s code. The possibility that Olive might be a ghost still made her feel awkward, too. Ghosts were even more rare and unpredictable than sorcerers, according to the stories she’d heard. That Olive had shown her nothing but kindness and companionship only made her feel more awkward for feeling awkward.

  Whistling a tune – one of Ugo’s folk tunes, unknowingly – she got to work, mindful of her bandaged hand.

  Almanac, meanwhile, flicked through books in search of hidden notes or other clues with an unabated sense of urgency. He had had few opportunities to read in the orphanage, since non-magical orphans weren’t considered a priority for literary education. Thankfully, he never forgot a lesson, and the temptation to pick just one book and dive into it was therefore strong. He resisted. If there was a spell in the library and he found it, he could read it, break it, and then … What followed would follow, as the saying went, he was sure.

  Starting a more ordered search, he reached for the bottom shelf nearest the door and took the first volume – a cloth-bound edition of Virgo Wildeyes packed with illustrations – and thoroughly skimmed through it. No notes fell out or appeared in the margins. There was no sign, in fact, that it had ever been read. There was just a single word, probably a name, engraved in black ink on the endpaper.

  Stormleigh.

  The handwriting was firm and precise. Stern, even. The next book was marked in exactly the same fashion, and the next. Almanac imagined the head of a household sitting down at their desk to mark each of their literary possessions with careful deliberation – or would they have a butler or secretary do it for them? He had no idea how people with money managed their lives.

  Either way, ‘Stormleigh’ had nothing to do with either Spoilnieu Manors or Sir Palemoon’s Ruin, so that mystery remained unresolved. It was simply another one to be shelved with the rest.

  He quickly settled into a routine. Pick up a book. Riffle through its pages to see if anything fell out. Check margins and the jacket for handwritten notes. Put it back on the shelf. Closer examination wasn’t possible – not if he planned to finish a bookcase that day, and Etta had made it clear that she expected him to do so. He wouldn’t have to smell a spell to know he’d found one. He was confident that he would notice anything out of place, if such a discovery awaited him.

  It was while examining a copy of C. J. Lovegreen’s Bestiary of Angels that he spied the first turned-down corner.

  He’d almost put the book back on the shelf, thinking the detail merely revealed that Bestiary of Angels had been started but not finished by some unknown reader. But a better instinct prompted him to take a closer look.

  The corner was neatly folded right next to the page number, 379. He wrote that down, in case it proved significant. Scanning the text on that page took some time, for it was very dense, but he went through it meticulously. Two lines from the bottom, he found a word that had been underlined: bellows.

  He wrote that down too, then stared at his two notes, one a number and one a word, wondering what they meant. There didn’t seem anything obvious to connect them either to each other or to anything in the manor. He found nothing else noteworthy after a thorough examination of the book.

  ‘You are very quiet, my friend. The recording of Die Schwarze Spinne you were listening to finished some time ago.’

  Almanac had put a random record on the phonogram to avoid having to talk.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Ugo.’ Almanac forced himself to speak normally, although he too felt uncomfortable with Ugo. The bigger the secret, the bigger the guilt: that was what the mistress had always told him. Could there be a bigger secret than, By the way, you’re probably dead?

  ‘Just thinking. Uh, does the word “bellows” mean anything to you? It’s marked in this book.’

  ‘I know what bellows are, but that is not what you are asking, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Ugo’s non-answers were always difficult to interpret. ‘It would be so much easier if you could just tell us about the spell.’

  ‘If there was one, I imagine it would have reasons for not wanting me to do so.’

  ‘So we won’t break it, I presume.’

  ‘Spells are strange. So my grandfather always said. He was apprenticed briefly to a travelling accountant who tried to teach him some magic, but his handwriting was bad, so he did not accomplish much. He told me once that spells are just words into which sorcerers put a little of themselves. They have minds of their own and can be very literal. That is why sorcerers must choose their words carefully.’

  ‘Or they’ll accidentally summon “pain” instead of “rain”.’

  ‘Yes! “Rabies” instead of “babies”.’

  ‘“Cold” instead of “gold”.’

  ‘Or even “mould”!’

  They laughed. It was easy to forget that Ugo might be a ghost when they talked liked this. Almanac was reminded of nights spent whispering to Josh after the lights went out, keeping each other company in the lonely darkness. He wondered who was keeping his friend company now that he was gone. Did Josh think he had forgotten him? Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Putting Bestiary of Angels aside in case it was needed later, he hastened on to the next book on the shelf,
which had no turned-down corners or words underlined, as far as he could see. Neither did the next, or the next, or the next …

  Half an hour later, he found another turned-over corner and another word. This time it was in a copy of Plum Impossible, page 189. The word was accordion.

  ‘You have found more?’ Ugo asked, responding to Almanac’s exultant ‘Aha!’

  ‘Yes, and you know what this means?’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  ‘That it must mean something. Once could have been chance. Twice, it’s because someone deliberately turned down those corners so we’d be sure to find the words. Therefore, the words mean something. And maybe the numbers too, and possibly the titles and the author names … Ugo, do you know if there was ever a librarian here?’

  ‘Yes. Her name was Veronica.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  Ugo said nothing, a sure sign that the spell was getting in the way. If Veronica the librarian really had left clues for others to follow, maybe the spell had done something horrible to her. That was another reason to break the spell and leave while they still could.

  ‘We’re getting somewhere at last,’ Almanac said, hoping it was true. ‘Etta will be pleased.’

  ‘I imagine she might have wanted to make this discovery herself,’ said Ugo.

  ‘Oh, you’re right.’ Some of Almanac’s excitement ebbed as he went into the sunroom to turn over the record. ‘Maybe she’s having her own luck downstairs … ’

  That wasn’t the case, alas for Etta. For all her vigorous shovelling, she had found nothing of significance. When she came up for lunch, she listened dispiritedly to Almanac’s account of the six turned-down corners he had found thus far and sniffed unhappily at the odour coming off her, which was all she had to show for her efforts. She was filthy and hadn’t moved nearly as much rubbish as she had hoped to. Of all days to trade with Almanac, it had to be this one, when he’d found something and got all the glory!

  ‘How about that tour of the house now?’ he asked her, as though the thought had just popped into his head.

  She suspected that he made the suggestion only to make her feel better – and it did, slightly. Veronica the librarian’s clues could wait while she showed off her excellence as an explorer.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my map.’

  They set off from the main stairway, following a long sequence of turns and switch-backs that soon had even Almanac disoriented. Several times he was certain they had crossed their own path only to discover a niche or window he had never seen before, proving that he was in new territory.

  ‘It’s big enough to be two manors in one,’ he jested. ‘Maybe that explains the name.’

  ‘Nonsense. That couldn’t possibly be it. And if it is, I’ll counter with the tower, which is quite dilapidated. Practically a ruin, you could say.’

  He didn’t laugh, because he couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. ‘Show me this tower, then. Is it very tall?’

  ‘Not really. I call it the tower, but it’s really more of an old gatehouse, you know, from a castle. Whoever made this place probably started there and let the building grow around it.’

  They came to a short passageway flagged with stones so worn from the pressure of many feet that they were bowled in the middle. At the end of it was a rough arch that led into the tower itself, and to Almanac’s eyes too it seemed more like ancient fortifications than a fairytale structure. It was squat and brutal, and its grey walls radiated cold. A stairwell had once climbed its interior but that was gone now, leaving only pockmarks in the walls to show where it had been. Almanac peered up at the distant roof, wondering who had lived and fought beneath its shelter.

  Etta wasn’t sharing his sentimental moment. She was on her knees, staring at the sheets of her impromptu map spread out on the ground before her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they built around it. Look.’

  He squatted next to her, and she explained. She hadn’t noticed it before because the map was on several pieces of paper. Taking Almanac on the tour had pieced it together in her mind, making something new leap out.

  ‘These are the four wings.’ She pointed. ‘Here’s the tower. What do you notice?’

  ‘The wings make an X.’

  ‘Yes, and … ?’

  ‘The tower’s in the centre.’

  ‘Exactly. X marks the spot.’

  ‘But the spot of what?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know? I’m not an architect. Or a sorcerer.’

  His gaze drifted back to the archway leading to the tower. From this slightly different angle, he could see the shape of a many-tailed lion engraved in the stone, and letters, blurred with time but still legible.

  ‘Etta, look!’

  The name engraved in the stone was Stormleigh.

  The sound of shouting echoed through the halls of the manor, growing louder as the source of the argument grew closer to the kitchen.

  ‘You didn’t find it,’ said Etta. ‘I found it.’

  ‘But I noticed it.’

  ‘So? Are you the only one who gets to have any fun today?’

  ‘What? Look, it doesn’t matter—’

  ‘It obviously does matter, because—’

  ‘I mean, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s all connected – the library, the tower—’

  ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you!’

  A shower of soot greeted Etta and Almanac as they entered the kitchen.

  ‘Ugo,’ Etta demanded of the fireplace, ‘what do you know about the Stormleighs? Do they have anything to do with the spell on this place?’

  There was no answer.

  ‘You scared him away,’ Almanac said.

  ‘I didn’t. You did.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s yelling!’

  ‘We’re both yelling, in case you hadn’t noticed!’

  Almanac forced himself to speak in a more normal voice, which of course made him sound stilted and patronising. ‘I don’t want to yell – it’s just you keep provoking me.’

  ‘Oh, that is it.’ She raised a glass to throw at him, but thought better of it at the last moment. Instead, she filled the glass with water and threw that at him.

  To her surprise, he burst into laughter. Dripping wet, face still flushed from shouting, he folded over with his hands on his knees and howled with mirth.

  ‘You looked just like … the mistress of … of the orphanage,’ he said between gasps. ‘ … and she’s seventy-two!’

  ‘Well, thanks a lot,’ Etta said. ‘But you deserved it.’

  ‘I daresay I did.’ He wiped his eyes and stood upright, still dripping. ‘We do have a way about us, don’t we? I can’t even remember where that all started.’

  ‘You said … no, I said … Oh, cranberries, who cares?’

  ‘Cranberries!’ he cried, doubling over again with laughter. This time, she joined him, and some minutes passed before they were able to talk without laughing again.

  ‘Where were we?’ he asked, putting on the kettle for a cup of chocolate.

  ‘I was going to suggest we check the paintings to see if there are any Stormleighs there,’ she said. ‘You know, if they’re the kind of people who might once have owned a castle.’

  ‘Or a library. That’s an excellent idea. Why don’t you do that after lunch while I keep looking through the books? Or vice versa?’

  ‘I’ll do the paintings, since it was my idea.’ Etta found the remains of a loaf of bread and began to carve thick slices for buttering. The burden of her misgivings had not been entirely erased by laughter. She could tell that Almanac felt bad about getting angry at her and was making an extra effort to be nice, but it bothered her that he never apologised for arguments that were at least half his fault.

  ‘And tomorrow we’ll swap back,’ he said.

  ‘Good. I don’t think I’ll ever smell right again!’

  The day, however, was not done yet, and Etta was perhaps over-diligent in exa
mining the manor’s many paintings for signs of its formerly eminent inhabitants: anything to avoid rubbish duty. The results of her survey included one duke, two ladies, a baron and several dusty knights – many of them Stormleighs but not all. There were several Daggets as well, although who they were wasn’t clear. ‘Permilia Stormleigh’ was the young girl with green eyes and smoky black hair whose portrait hung in the lobby. Etta had come to like that painting most out of all of them. Not just because it was an excellent work, but because ‘Permilia’ had a resolute look that suggested she wasn’t going to give up easily, either.

  ‘How strange,’ Almanac said when she reported on her finds in the library. ‘Charting your family tree back hundreds of years! I don’t even know who my parents were.’

  A glimpse of deep hurt passed behind Almanac’s eyes. This was a subject he rarely raised. Etta shied away from replying that he was lucky not to have a father who wished he’d never been born and a mother to whom he was a trial.

  As there was nothing to connect the portraits to magic or the spell, she changed the subject to one more positive.

  ‘How goes it here?’ she asked. ‘Any new clues from the mysterious Veronica?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s so much quicker now I know to just look for the turned-down corners. You’ll get through the rest of the library in no time.’

  He handed her a sheet of paper. Under Bellows and Accordion were now written When, Bicycle, Rusty, No, Sword, Broken, Sickle, Right, Is and Effigy, along with their corresponding page numbers.

  ‘Doesn’t look like a spell to me,’ she said. ‘In fact, it looks like gibberish.’

  ‘Let’s not give up yet.’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘I know—’ He made a visible effort to check an automatic defensive response. ‘Do you want to swap places now? I’m happy to finish downstairs.’

  ‘No. I said I’d give you a full day off, and I don’t want to be accused of shirking.’

  ‘All right, then. Have fun.’