Fiercombe Manor (26 page)

I
suppose I was tired after my walk up to Stanwick, and so I must have dozed a little then. The next thing I was aware of was the
soughing of the wind in the trees outside, a rhythmic sound that should have sent me back to sleep but instead—in that strange little summerhouse, a room so redolent of someone else—made me more alert. The light had faded while I'd slept. The afternoon had gone, and I realised that if I didn't go back to the manor soon, I would have to make the walk in the dark again. Besides, I was hungry, and as Mrs. Jelphs so often reminded me, I needed to eat for the baby.

I stood for a minute at the window that faced west, out over the overgrown meadow that lay on the other side of Fiery Lane. The light was retreating from the valley floor fast, as though it wanted to turn its back on the place. As I carefully descended the twisting stone steps, my eyes on my feet in the gloom, I hummed a song my father had liked and which I associated with him going out to the shed at the bottom of our narrow stripe of lawn. I would hear his low voice through my open bedroom window, curling up through the balmy air of a summer evening like the fragrant pipe tobacco he sometimes smoked. There would be a dog barking a few gardens down, and my mother would have the wireless on. That world didn't just seem far away to me there, alone in the depths of Fiercombe's valley; it felt like a scene from another life. Still, the familiar tune was a comfort to me as I stepped back inside that creaking old hulk of a house. It remained empty; I could feel it.

I ate standing up in the kitchen, two clumsily sawed slices of bread spread with jam. I didn't want it now, and each mouthful, soft and cloying and sticking to my teeth, threatened to come up as soon as I'd forced it down my throat. But I knew I ought to have it, and so I chewed doggedly on, sipping water from the kitchen tap to help it down.

On the very edges of my hearing a high-pitched whine started up—barely discernible but unmistakably there once I'd registered
it. I wished it would stop before it gave me a headache, but it kept on, setting my teeth on edge. The sweetness of the jam had gone from my mouth, and it now tasted coldly of metal. I was pushing my finger around inside it to see if I'd bitten my tongue and drawn blood when I heard some other sound, beyond the whine. I gripped the knife I still held in my other hand and turned off the tap. As a final drip of water fell, it came again: a whisking, swishing sound that made my heart stammer in my chest and caused the baby—a beat later—to kick me so hard in my full bladder that I couldn't help but let go, feeling the warmth of my urine soak through my underwear and turn cold on my inner thighs.

I stood for a time, my head still but my eyes darting back and forth, scanning for movement. Even as I waited, it seemed to get darker outside. I knew with total certainty in that moment that I was the only living thing there, not just in the house, which I'd already sensed, but in the whole valley. Ruck was not in the barn, tidying up his tools for the day; Mrs. Jelphs was not tending her flowers in the last of the light.

A whole minute passed, but I could hear nothing. All the while, waiting for it to come again, my brain was dismantling each element of the sound and then putting it back together to make something recognisable. I thought I knew it then: the movement of skirts against the panels, the swish of heavy fabric brushing wood. Even as I thought it, I dismissed it. It's just the dark, I told myself; the dark has always played tricks on you.

In an appearance of bravery I didn't feel, I put the knife silently down on the breadboard and crept out into the hall. A faint, sickly glimmer of light showed at the end, where the passageway opened out into the high entrance hall. It faded as I made my way towards it, and by the time I got there, there was nothing to see.

A soft creak made me snap my head round towards the front door I hadn't been able to budge on my first day. Through the gaps around the old, warped wood, I could see a narrow slice of the western sky, which was carrying off the last of the day's sun. In the dark hall, it seemed to lick around the gaps like flames. I didn't want to be there any longer, however irrational I knew I was being. I hurried upstairs, gripping my belly as I went, to what I hoped would be the sanctuary of my room and my own belongings.

After hurriedly washing and changing into my night things, I sat on the bed for a long time, my senses jangling, my breathing rapid and shallow. For the sake of the baby I tried to calm down, but deliberately slowing my breathing made me feel as if I was suffocating. As unattractive as I had found the notion before, I now rose to my knees to loosen the bed curtains from their threadbare moorings. There were no moths this time, and I was grateful for that at least. Soon I was enclosed on all sides by the dense brocade, my heartbeat very audible in the confined space.

I lay back, tucking myself under the blankets, and immediately began to sweat, but that seemed a small price to pay for feeling a little bit safer. Finally I fell into a fitful sleep, only to have the most vivid dream of my life.

In it, I dreamt I woke on hearing a rustle, followed by a silvery tinkle of laughter. The damp bedclothes I'd wrapped myself in felt icy against my skin, a watery shroud. I pulled them off, ready to get up if I needed to, and watched my stomach—poking up through the soaked white cotton of my nightdress—ripple and jump as the baby roiled around, much larger than he was in reality.

Outside I looked up to see that the last of the light had finally slunk away, quickly and craftily, so that I found myself abandoned quite suddenly in the complete darkness. That was when some
movement caught my eye: a glimpse of paleness that gradually took shape.

I saw her hair first, a white shimmer that took shape around a little face whose features sharpened as I watched. Where there had been nothing, there was now a figure in the corner of my room, her outline not quite finished and her feet lost beneath the floorboards, leaving just the tops of her button boots visible. In the dream I scrambled to sit up, and when I looked back up she was much closer, just behind the bedpost. She looked back at me levelly but with no expression, her eyes shining like mercury and quite empty. One of her small hands stole around the post, and something about it, the little fingers gripping the oak, made me rear back, certain she was about to heave herself onto the bed, that she wanted to be close to me.

As I recoiled she seemed to fade slightly, her edges fizzling, the strange glow she emanated in the darkened room diminishing. Something approaching an emotion passed across her features then, but what it was I couldn't tell until I felt a wave of clammy hopelessness wash through me. It was such an awful feeling, so far beyond the limits of mere sadness and melancholy, that for a moment it swept away my fear. I watched her retreat and move off around the room, her little head bent so that her bright cap of silky hair swung forward to cloak everything but the tip of her snub nose.

I believe she moved right through the closed door, but it's difficult to say for sure; by the time she reached it, she had almost faded to nothing, her features dissolving as I watched into a shapeless aura of cold light. As the last of her went, now no more than a breath in winter air, I felt the sadness disperse, as though I'd been dragged ashore and wrung dry of it.

I understood I was dreaming then and woke myself up with a horrible start, desperate to escape the most powerful dream I had ever experienced. I still have the memory of that feeling the
little girl left me with; unlike the pain of childbirth, it refuses to be forgotten.

I thought of going outside and up the bluebell paths by memory, to take refuge with Mr. Morton. But the frisson I had felt spark in the air of my dream was gone, and I was oddly calm. I switched on the lamp and reached under the pillow for my diary. Instead my hand closed around the little velveteen hare I had forgotten all about. The words I'd read in Elizabeth's diary entered my head unbidden: “I believe it's a daughter,” and then, “our little girl will turn one next week.”

Once again I must have fallen asleep sitting up. I woke stiff and muddled until the dream flooded back in its powerful entirety. It felt quite unlike the usual sort, where holes in a strange narrative expand until the whole thing falls to ash, even as you try to play it again, dry paper held over a flame. I knew I wouldn't go back to sleep, though it was barely dawn, the light when I pulled back the curtain a pearlescent grey, only the slightest blush colouring the eastern sky. The valley still slumbered on.

I went downstairs and hurried along to the kitchen, remembering the accident I'd had and wishing for the first time that no one had yet returned. They had not, and thankfully everything was just as I'd left it. I mopped the floor twice and put the breadboard and knife back in their places, all the while humming as I had the previous evening, deliberately clattering about so I could attribute any noise to myself. I knew I had worked myself up over nothing more than a creaky old house and a ghostly, melancholy dream, but both were still fresh in my mind, and I was unable to loosen the tension inside me.

After the kitchen was tidy, I went to the small parlour and played patience for an interminable couple of hours, using a pack of cards Mrs. Jelphs had dug out the previous week. Questions wormed
their way into my thoughts even as I shuffled and arranged the cards in neat columns: Why had I dreamt so powerfully of a little girl? Who had the velveteen hare belonged to? And the question that had lurked in my mind since the very beginning: What happened here? I thought about going back to the summerhouse and the diary in which the answers to those questions might lie, but I didn't feel quite up to it.

Finally I heard the kitchen door close and hurried back there. Nan jumped when she saw me framed in the doorway.

“Oh, Alice, you scared me! I didn't expect anyone to be up so early. Here, you're looking peaky.”

I shook my head. “I'm all right, Nan. I just had the strangest dream. I can't seem to shake the feeling I had in it.”

“I have those sometimes,” she said sympathetically. “I had one once about the boy who lives next door but one. I don't even like him much, but in this dream I felt as though I loved him. For two whole days I couldn't work out how I felt about him. It was the funniest thing.”

I laughed weakly and watched her go about her tasks in the kitchen, my mind soon wandering back to the vision of the little girl.

“You're brave spending the night here alone,” she said as she filled the kettle, the water echoing noisily as it filled the battered old thing. She turned. “You did get the message, didn't you, about Mrs. Jelphs's bad back?”

“No, I didn't know where they were. Is she all right?”

Nan shook her head. “I'll strangle that Will Kimber when I see him. He was supposed to run down here and tell you. Mrs. Jelphs put her back out and had to stay. Ruck stayed on for some supper there, and then apparently he went for a pint in the pub. He never normally gets the chance. Were you scared?”

I managed a smile. “Not really. It was just the dream that unsettled me. I'm glad it's morning, though.”

As Nan grinned at me before turning to put the kettle on the range, I pictured again the little girl—surely Elizabeth's little girl, as my sleeping mind had imagined her. The hold of the dream should have been diminishing, but it had left me more intrigued than ever, the threads of Fiercombe's past binding me tighter and tighter.

It was quiet for a time after that, the weeks accumulating gradually, sliding past in an easy routine of work and meals and sleep—blessedly dreamless sleep. I thought of going to the summerhouse more than a few times, but I was busy helping Mrs. Jelphs during the day. By evening I was generally exhausted.

Three times I heaved myself up to the village: once with Mrs. Jelphs to meet the midwife, a broad, kind-faced country woman who, to my profound relief, had nothing about her of the abortionist, and twice to visit Mr. Morton. On those last occasions, I returned to the manor to find Mrs. Jelphs sitting pensively in her usual armchair, as though she had been waiting anxiously for my return. I knew she disapproved of me leaving the boundaries of Fiercombe, but I never asked her outright, and she never said anything, except for the odd oblique comment about taking good care of myself “for the child's sake.” I still felt guilty for it, but after that first time, I made sure I went up the gentler of the bluebell paths, and took my time climbing it. I didn't know what else I could do to assuage her anxieties, short of never leaving the manor.

Besides, without those pathetic little bids for freedom, I knew my occasional sense of being a prisoner in the valley would begin to overwhelm me. I can't really describe the exact sensation; only the certainty that I had to get out every now and then, as though I was a sea creature obliged to swim to the surface to breathe. I suppose
it was simply a kind of claustrophobia, heightened by a watchful Mrs. Jelphs and the pregnancy hormones flooding through me.

At Mr. Morton's—I didn't yet feel I could call him Hugh, though he repeatedly asked me to—I felt closest to my old self. It didn't for a moment occur to me that he might mind my spontaneous visits. He told me about his family, especially his wife, who had died fifteen years earlier. She was buried in Stanwick's churchyard, in a tranquil corner overlooking the next valley. They had never had children, and I thought it was a shame; he would have made a wonderful father.

He always asked me how I was getting on at Fiercombe, but it was nice to be away, so I steered the conversation towards other subjects. I was no less intrigued by Elizabeth and the valley's past, but I found I had become possessive of them. The diary was my secret, and it had offered me a different, more intimate view of Elizabeth that Hugh Morton couldn't possibly know about. As much as I liked him, I didn't want to share it, and was afraid I would if we talked as we had that first afternoon. He went along with this reticence until the end of my third afternoon call, when he caught me gently by my arm at the door.