Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  ‘I won’t!’

  Etta trudged back to the cellar, wishing her mother could see her now, voluntarily taking on a responsibility she hated, even though Almanac had offered her a way out of it. She was filthy already, she supposed.

  Taking up her shovel again, she pondered the day’s revelations. Ten apparently random words. One family name. A manor shaped in an X. All of it knowledge, but all incomplete in one way or another. There were more words to come, no doubt. She didn’t know who the Stormleighs were or had been. Maybe the X referred to the tower, or maybe it didn’t, because she wasn’t foolish enough to think that her map was done yet, either.

  The cellar, for instance. It was the perfect place to hide something magical. But how would you ever find it again, she thought, in all this mess?

  After what seemed like a small eternity of mechanical shovelling and wheelbarrowing through mounds of rotten junk, she had had enough.

  ‘What’s the time, Olive?’ she asked. ‘Hammer out the nearest hour for me.’

  Five came the answer. Time for a much-needed bath in one of the luxurious guest bathrooms on the first floor, but first, she decided, a quick inspection of the cellar’s extent. Taking up a candelabra and making sure she had matches in case the flickering flames went out, she set off to explore. Who knew what she might find in the cavernous underground of the manor, beyond the edge of the rubbish?

  Foregoing the relatively small patches of floor exposed by their recent excavations, she climbed onto the refuse itself and set off, placing her feet carefully for fear of treading on something sharp. Fortunately, the soles of her shoes were thick. Teetering occasionally on the remains of objects long-forgotten that protruded from the general morass, stained, twisted, and unrecognisable, she headed out into the shadows.

  This was what years of wealth and waste looked like, she told herself. Buildings would fall down, and ruins would erode to nothing, but rubbish pits were forever.

  Doctor Mithily was smart, she thought, to send Almanac down here on his quest. The cellar was a great hiding place.

  Her candles guttered in the foul air, and she thought perhaps it was time to head back before she choked.

  Then her right foot caught on something. She twisted and fell with a cry, barely keeping hold of the candelabra. The flames flickered perilously.

  She held her breath as the dimmed candlelight steadied, then twisted about to release her trapped limb.

  Her shoe was caught under a curved piece of wood that protruded from the rubbish like the root of a tree. Etta wriggled her foot until it slipped free. Rubbing her ankle, she stood very carefully, and found that it was only lightly sprained and could take her weight. With her good foot, she kicked the offending object, which she now saw was a cartwheel, incompletely buried in the detritus. Enough stuck out to trip an unwary explorer.

  Not magical in the slightest, and therefore worse than useless.

  Olive tapped something on the pipes.

  ‘I’m okay, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Etta said. ‘Better get that boiler working, because I’m going to need two baths now.’

  The pipes chimed once for yes.

  Etta set off, no longer filled with the thrill of discovery. Her hands were sticky and something slimy was trickling down the back of her neck. She was heartily glad that Almanac would resume this chore tomorrow. All she would have to do was write down Veronica’s puzzling words. Their meanings wouldn’t elude Etta Jacobs forever.

  Three days later, Almanac was shovelling at the base of a large mound of rubbish while Olive tested his new language skill by describing her former life. She had been born into a wealthy family, but her circumstances had been unfortunate in every other way. Regarded as property to be traded by her father and a liability to be offloaded by her mother, marriage had seemed her only hope of escape. When the match presented to her turned out to be of the worst possible kind – to a cruel widower with children older than her, who made it plain that they resented her – Olive had leapt at the chance offered by the mysterious Madame Iris to flee to a distant manor. No fortune was worth the sacrifice of any chance of future happiness.

  ‘Are you happy here?’ asked Almanac. It was a genuine question. He had been, briefly, before the thought of a vengeful sorcerer ruined that for him.

  She had Ugo, Olive replied, who valued her for who she was, not for what wealth she might bring to the family.

  ‘You don’t feel … trapped?’

  He disliked asking so directly, as he suspected she would be evasive, but he had to know. If the spell wasn’t real and she wasn’t a prisoner, then what was she?

  Most people believe, she said, that you’re only trapped if you can’t escape. But you can be trapped if you don’t want to escape, too.

  ‘So which is it?’

  Olive was silent.

  There was the sticking point. She either wouldn’t or couldn’t say more, which left him exactly where he had started. Was the manor a trap from which he and Etta still had a chance of escaping, or a home for ghosts, which the two of them might one day become, at the whim of some unknown sorcerer?

  His broken promise to Josh nagged at his conscience. He had all the materials ready to write the letter, but what was the point if he couldn’t get to the nearest village in order to send it? And to what end would he do that? He could hardly tell Josh to come join him in the house under a spell they didn’t know how to break. That might be worse than being in the orphanage. Their confinement might not be unpleasant, but it was still confinement – and if the sorcerer did come back …

  Maybe, he thought, he should spend the night in the kitchen to see if anyone snuck out either to take food from the pantry or to put food into it. He was pretty sure the dead followed rules just like the living, and one of those rules had to be that they didn’t eat, or else how would they survive in an empty old house with no one to cook for them?

  Maybe if he could work out what Olive and Ugo and the others really were, he might learn more about the spell.

  Maybe enough to break it …

  Without warning, the summit of the rubbish-mound shifted and he was forced to leap out of the way to avoid an avalanche. With a squawk of alarm, he landed face-forward on the slippery rock floor. A sluggish tide enveloped his shoes.

  Rapid drumming that he had learned to recognise as Olive’s laughter came from the pipes.

  ‘Yes, yes, hilarious,’ he said, clambering upright and cleaning himself off as best he could.

  ‘It was, actually,’ Etta agreed, chuckling.

  He turned. She was approaching from the stairs with a mug of something hot in her hand. She came down at least once a day to inspect the diggings. While he was grateful for her company, he did feel like she wished only that he would shovel faster and discover something.

  ‘I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘You missed lunch, so I brought you a cup of tea.’ She set it on a chair they had brought down from the level above.

  ‘Thanks. I guess I lost track of time.’

  ‘Again. Sometimes I think you like this job more than you let on.’

  He dismissed that suggestion with a wave, although he did have to acknowledge a certain satisfaction in the cleared space that was growing larger every day.

  ‘Found anything interesting?’

  Almanac pointed at the line of old bottles and plates – all broken – that he was collecting along one wall and shook his head. ‘No books, scrolls or tablets – or coins, medals or badges.’

  Nothing with writing, in other words.

  ‘Disappointing,’ she sniffed. She had brought the updated library list with her to show him how it had grown. It now contained over fifty words with their matching page numbers, author names and book titles. The most recent entries had been added that morning, but none of the words or numbers made sense to either of them.

  Etta felt a twinge of alarm at the thought that the author of the spell, whoever it was, might return before she succeeded in unravell
ing the puzzle. At nights she lay awake, meaningless words and vague fears tangling her in a mental net she could only submit to, exhausted, in the darkest hours.

  She shook her head. ‘There’s got to be something down here or in the library. This isn’t just a weird old house full of weird people – sorry, Olive, but you have to admit it – or else we could actually leave any time we wanted.’

  A week ago, they had formed a plan to stake out the gate. When someone next opened it, perhaps Silas with Lord Nigel’s key, they could run through and escape.

  No one had come, though, and neither had anyone walked by on the outside of the grounds, apart from easily startled sheep, who ran away on seeing them. Ultimately, the scheme had been neglected in the face of more pressing mysteries inside the house.

  ‘There might be another way to break the spell,’ she said.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, draining the last of his tea. ‘You think of it while I keep shovelling.’

  It wasn’t that he disagreed with her. He simply had his hands full, literally, with digging in hope of finding a solution.

  He turned back to the avalanche, which had unfortunately covered some of the ground he had previously cleared. His idle thought that every effort he made in the cellars was for nothing bothered him as much as it did Etta, and if he was honest with himself it had been haunting him for a while now. He could only hope that he hadn’t jinxed them by voicing it.

  Half-revealed by the avalanche was a metal frame attached to several scraps of once-brightly coloured cloth. He tugged it free, intending to toss it aside, but froze, staring at it.

  ‘What is it?’ Etta asked, noticing his sudden stillness.

  ‘It’s an old lampshade.’

  ‘If you say so. Do you want it for your room?’

  She was jesting with him, but he didn’t laugh.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything to you?’

  ‘Why would it?’

  ‘The list you just showed me. On page 5 of Samantha Borges’s Cupid’s Peril, you found the word shade. Four words later, next to page 4 of The Science of the Sheikh by Ishmael Fieldsberry, you wrote lamp. And we just found a lampshade.’

  ‘You remembered all that?’ For an instant, his impressive feat of memory overshadowed the significance of the connection he had made. ‘Wait. Are you saying this lampshade is what Veronica was referring to when she left these clues?’

  ‘Could this be the method to Isaac’s madness?’

  They closely examined the remains of the lampshade. No smell of magic, Etta reported, and there was no visible writing that either of them could see. So what did it mean?

  ‘It has to mean something,’ she said, peering out across the hillocks and gullies of rubbish. Veronica and Isaac had left messages for them. It was up to them to work out how those messages were connected, if they hoped to escape.

  Maybe if the other items on the list were also to be found in the cellar, then they would really be onto something.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, filled with an overwhelming sense of certainty. ‘I’ve got it.’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘I bet you the best cake you ever saw that I find cart and wheel in the library before I’m done.’

  ‘Like the one you tripped over?’

  ‘Not just like it. The same one. I think the words in the library aren’t random at all. I think they’re a catalogue.’

  She beamed triumphantly, and he hated that he didn’t totally share her enthusiasm.

  ‘A catalogue of rubbish? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just because they’re not magical things doesn’t mean they aren’t important in some other way.’

  ‘And what do the numbers mean?’

  He had her there. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So how does this change anything?’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t right now … but still!’ She folded up the pages of the list and stuffed them into a pocket. ‘There’s no need to be so mean.’

  ‘Am I? I wasn’t trying to—’

  ‘Just keep an eye out while you dig for anything else on the list,’ she said, turning and walking sourly back to the stairs. ‘Maybe then you’ll be impressed!’

  ‘Etta—’

  But she was gone, and he was left wishing he hadn’t said the wrong thing. What they had found was interesting, even if he couldn’t see what it meant. Maybe it was something like the name Stormleigh, a detail that expanded their knowledge of the manor without actually helping them in any obvious way. Yet.

  All knowledge was good, he reminded himself. The point of an almanac, after all, was to be a repository of information that might one day become useful.

  He could only hope ‘one day’ came sooner rather than later and in the meantime keep digging as fast as he could.

  While Almanac had his bath, Etta wrote a note explaining that she wanted to go for her walk alone tonight and that he should make dinner for himself when he was ready. She left it on the kitchen table and went out, not caring if he ate toast or nothing at all. She had made sandwiches to eat later when her stomach demanded, and was also carrying a blanket to sit on, and to wrap herself in if she got cold.

  She was going to watch the gate again, at least until the light failed. Also, truthfully, she needed to get away from Almanac for a while. They were giving each other the crotchets, as her ma called it, being cooped up together all the time. There was no getting past the fact that they argued a lot. Usually they ended up on the same page, more or less, but when he insisted on downplaying what she had thought was a major discovery just because he hadn’t made it, there was no possibility of getting on.

  Etta wondered if Almanac didn’t want either of them to discover anything. He seemed happy in the cellar because it gave his life routine. Doctor Mithily couldn’t have given his job to someone who liked order and neatness more than him.

  Whereas Etta …

  She had had access to books growing up. Once reconciled to the fact that she would never be a sorcerer like Dizzy, young Etta had learned to read simply for pleasure, and had taken to the habit of borrowing books from the manor library and reading them at night when she couldn’t sleep. She preferred adventures, but they only made her present horizons seem very close. Quite apart from the threat of being killed by an angry sorcerer, whose ghosts had lured her into their house under false pretences, what if she lived but never left? What kind of fate was that for a strong-willed, capable girl?

  Etta yearned to break free. Or at least be appreciated. She would never be valued here if Almanac wouldn’t give her the credit she deserved – which made her as bad off as she had been at home! Ignored. Unappreciated. Forgotten.

  There was a bushy copse not far from the gates. She settled between two ferns and found what comfort she could, the blanket folded beneath her and her sandwiches on her lap.

  Time passed. No one came to open the gates. There was only a narrow chance that someone would come, she knew, but trying made her feel better, and it was her enterprise, and hers alone. There was no one else to make mistakes or steal her thunder or her ideas, which was something she decided was entirely within Almanac’s character to do. She had seen boys do so before, in the village square. They were all the same – at least, that’s what her ninth sister Perry (Despair) said.

  Day faded and the light became brittle with dusk. She ate her sandwiches, wishing for a cup of water to wash them down, and wrapped the blanket around her legs. No mosquitos bothered her, and no ants either, which struck her as odd. Maybe Silas had put something on the soil to keep them away.

  As though summoned by her thought, a rustling issued from her left, and the off-kilter silhouette of the gardener came into view.

  ‘Fine night for star-watching, young miss,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you’re doing.’

  ‘I might as well be,’ she replied, picking out a bothersome stone from under her and tossing it away.

  ‘There’s some as say our fates are set by the stars,’ he sa
id. ‘I would not be one of them.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. I’m of the mind that we can make our own fate, or at least endeavour to, as best we are able. Would you agree or not?’

  ‘Yes … that is, I think I do agree.’ Of all the topics of conversations she had expected to share with Silas, philosophy was low on her list. ‘Therefore, you could try to get the key from Lord Nigel for us, if you really wanted to.’

  ‘Heh-heh. You’re a spirited lass, there’s no mistaking it! But that I cannot do. It’s been tried before, you see, and it’s an effort that don’t bear repeating. The gates stay closed.’

  She gazed at the gilded obstacle, which had lost a lot of its lustre in the crepuscular light. Strange to think that such a thing, which might be easily climbed were it not for all its sharp edges and points, stood between her and the rest of the world.

  ‘I see you and the young master have visited the garden shed,’ Silas said. ‘There’s much to occupy a busy mind in there, and you should feel free to,’ he added. ‘I was young once, lass. I remember my first discovery of gardening – the thrill of taking dead earth and bringing forth bounty. You ought to try doing the same. In the shed you’ll find the seeds, the tools, anything you might need. Just take them. Even my gloves, though they might be too big for your hands. I’ll leave them out for you. No need to ask.’

  ‘Thank you, Silas,’ she said, wondering if this was another trick to keep her occupied. ‘Maybe I will.’

  ‘I’ll be off now,’ he said, with what might have been a quick duck of his head. ‘Mind you don’t catch a chill staying up too late. Nobody’s coming tonight, I fancy.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, understanding now that he had known her true purpose all along.

  She waited until the stars were out before packing up her impromptu campsite and heading home. The odds of someone leaving the manor were zero, if they knew she was watching. Another time, perhaps, she could sneak away without being seen …

  The granddaughter clock in the hall chimed nine as she came in. Etta wound it – one of the few regular household chores she had adopted, apart from the occasional desultory dusting, was to mind the manor’s timepieces – and then headed quickly up the stairs to bed. She neither expected nor wished to speak to Almanac, but when she was between sheets that seemed as clean and fresh as the day she arrived, she relented a little, and knocked on the wall between them to say goodnight.