The Mystery of Wickworth Manor (5 page)

‘Good morning!’ a bright voice said.

He looked up. Paige.

He looked down again.

‘Not a morning person?’ She put her tray down. ‘Neither is my mum. She says I rabbit on worse than daytime telly. Usually she likes it, but not before she’s had her morning tea.’ She sat down. ‘Sal and Jo are on their way. But listen,’ her voice dropped to a whisper, ‘we all need to get our story straight.’

Curtis didn’t answer.

‘We all have to go and get told off this morning, remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘Good. I thought you were giving me the silent treatment for a minute. Oh, here they are.’

Curtis looked up. Sal and Jo were walking towards the table, arm in arm. Sal looked worried, her dark eyes shiny with emotion. Jo held her chin up, ready for anything. He nodded to them as they squeezed in next to Paige. The three were sat across from him like they were planning on interrogating him.

‘So,’ Paige said. ‘I’ll do the talking. I’ll say we were just telling each other ghost stories, for fun, and we’re really sorry and nothing like that will ever happen again and we’ve learned our lesson. We don’t say anything about the painting or the seance or the Wickworth Boy. How does that sound?’

Curtis shrugged. It sounded like Paige was used to being in trouble.

Chapter 10

Paige wasn’t worried. Mrs Burton-Jones might have seemed like an angry bullfrog last night, but really, who was at their best in the middle of the night? It was only natural to get a bit freaked out if you thought someone was summoning demons in your house. Paige bet Mrs Burton-Jones was lovely when you got to know her.

‘You four children are a menace and a disgrace,’ Mrs Burton-Jones said. ‘Never in all my days have I been so disgusted.’

Well, maybe she wasn’t
lovely
. Maybe she was more
OK
.

‘You’ve shown me that your school is not to be trusted. Hoodlums and vandals, the lot of you.’

All right, maybe she was a bullfrog.

Paige stood with Curtis, Sal and Jo in Mrs Burton-Jones’s lounge. It wasn’t like the lounge back at home with the flat-screen TV and the squidgy sofa. This room had spindly old furniture and knick-knacks that would break as soon as you looked at them and posh things like a little piano and an old globe.

Mrs Burton-Jones sat on a pale blue sofa. Miss Brown stood beside her – frowning her bad frown.

‘What have you got to say for yourselves?’

‘We’re not vandals,’ Paige said. She glanced over at Curtis, who was looking down at his shoes. ‘Really. Or hoodlums. We’re sorry, Miss. We didn’t mean any harm. We were just being daft. Over-excitement, I bet. That’s what my mum says about me sometimes. We were being silly, trying to scare each other with ghost stories. But we won’t do anything like that again. I promise.’

Miss Brown made a noise that, if she hadn’t been a teacher, would have been a snort.

‘Well, I should think so too,’ Mrs Burton-Jones said. ‘I’ve had trouble from Friar’s Street before. But I’d have expected more from a Northdene boy. My sons went there, you know. It’s very upsetting.’

Miss Brown’s frown became even sterner. ‘Yes. Quite. Paige, I don’t want to hear another complaint like this again. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘And the same goes for the rest of you. Any more nonsense and you’ll be sent straight home.’

Mrs Burton-Jones nodded. ‘I’m not sure I shouldn’t just send you home this minute, but Miss Brown assures me that this won’t happen again.’

‘No, Miss,’ everyone muttered.

Miss Brown shook her head, then said, ‘OK, off you trot.’

In the hallway outside, Paige grinned at Curtis. ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad.’

His eyebrows furrowed together and his mouth twisted into a scowl. ‘Speak for yourself. I’m never letting you get me into something like that again. Just stay away from me, OK?’

He turned away from them and stormed down the corridor. Paige watched him go, then said to Sal and Jo, ‘What’s up with him? We’re not being sent home, are we?’

What was Curtis’s problem?

Chapter 11

Curtis ignored everyone all morning. It was easy to do; Mr Appleton took them on a nature walk around the grounds. Curtis wrote occasionally in the notebook he’d been given:
oak
,
elder
,
sycamore
, and drew a few rough outlines of leaves. But he wasn’t able to concentrate. The heat made his brain feel fuzzy. He kept remembering Mrs Burton-Jones’s words:
I’d have expected more from a Northdene boy
.

But he wasn’t a Northdene boy. Not any more.

That life was gone. Over.

The minute he had stepped into the headmaster’s office and seen the look of disappointment on his face, Curtis had known it was over. He had thought that telling his mum and dad would be the worst part. But it wasn’t. The worst part was having to look at them every day, knowing how badly he had let them down.

I’d have expected more from a Northdene bo
y
.

Curtis was glad when Mr Appleton said it was time to go back for lunch.

He let everyone else rush past him into the dining hall. He couldn’t face it. He’d just go and hide until it was time for whatever pointless group activity was planned for the afternoon.

He thought he’d go up to his room, maybe find something to read, or play on his phone. He paused halfway up the staircase. Everyone would be at lunch. That meant he had the perfect opportunity to look around the manor. It was the perfect time to search for an internet connection or maybe a library. He wouldn’t waste this hour; he’d find out about the boy in the portrait.

There had to be a library somewhere. Country houses all had libraries.

He leapt up the last few steps on to the first landing. Unlike the corridor at the top of the house, where his room was, this was wide, with high ceilings and moulded cornices. This was still the grand part of the house. The perfect place for the library. There were three doors on the south side of the corridor, all marked ‘private’. Just his luck. Well, he would just have to be quick and hope he didn’t get caught. He glanced up and down the corridor before peeking into the rooms. Behind the first door, Curtis discovered a music room. The second door revealed a small sitting room.

He found what he was looking for behind the third door. It swung open on silent hinges. Inside, the air smelled of dust and warm pages. He felt his heart rise. The smell of books and summer afternoons.

Three huge windows looked out on to the lake and the chapel in the distance. The other three walls were ranged floor-to-ceiling with books; leather-bound volumes in shades of red, brown and green. He walked into the room, breathing it all in. Then he noticed a computer on a small desk. It was old, with a thick square screen and dust on the keyboard. It was pushed into a corner, as though it had been dumped and forgotten about. Did it even work?

He stepped over to it and switched it on. The screen lit up. Perhaps it had belonged to one of Mrs Burton-Jones’s grown-up sons. As he waited for the computer to load, he looked around the shelves. There were books on law and science; a few on philosophy that were written in Latin. They must be really old, perhaps as old as the house itself.

Curtis went back to the computer and sat down. He clicked Internet Explorer and heard a weird clicking sound, like a fax machine. Dial-up? Wow, this really was ancient. The pages were slow to load, as though the computer was waking from a deep sleep. He listened out for any noises from the corridor. It was silent, for now. Still, he had to be quick if he didn’t want to get caught. If that was even possible without broadband. He opened a search engine, but Googling ‘Wickworth Manor’ just brought up information about canoeing holidays and team-building weekends. Useless.

What about the portrait? He tried ‘Wickworth portraits’, ‘painting 1805’ and ‘black servant picture’ but none of the images that loaded – painfully slowly – was the one he was looking for.

He expanded the search. Galleries, museums, history of art, he clicked on link after link. But nothing. This was like looking very slowly for a needle in a mountain-sized haystack. The new page in the notebook beside him remained empty. He sat back in the chair.

Outside, he could hear the sound of a game of football drifting up from the lawn. Everyone must have finished lunch. He didn’t have long left.

He turned away from the screen. The books. Were any of them about Wickworth Manor? He scanned the shelves. Then his eyes landed on a spine that looked different, out of place. It looked more modern than any of the others. He took a closer look:
Stately Homes of Britain vol. XX
. Aha! Why else would they only have volume twenty and none of the earlier volumes?

Curtis pulled it off the shelf and looked at the contents page. There!
Chapter 6. Wickworth Manor, Avon.
They’d bought the book that had themselves in it.

‘“Wickworth Manor in Avon,”’
he read,
‘“is a fine example of neoclassical architecture. The original house was established in the Tudor period, but was completely redesigned in the late eighteenth century when it was purchased by William Burton. The Burton family came to prominence at that time as leading merchants with wealth generated by West Indian sugar plantations.”’

Despite the warmth of the sunshine flooding in through the windows, Curtis suddenly felt cold.

Sugar plantations.

Slavery. They’d studied that at Northdene.

He knew that early sugar plantations were worked by slaves; people who were bought and sold like animals. People who were taken from Africa and transported to a new continent, a place where they knew no one and had no family and no hope of returning home. Was that what had happened to the boy in the portrait?

Curtis slumped down to the floor and propped the book against his knees. He felt sick. He took a slow, deep breath and carried on reading:

‘“The family prospered and built the house that stands on the site today, totally demolishing all remnants of the earlier building. But William Burton did not live to enjoy his new palatial home; he died in 1805 following the untimely death of his youngest daughter, Patience, a few weeks earlier. The estate was inherited by his elder daughter, Verity Burton, who died without issue in 1866 at which point it passed to a cousin.”’

Curtis skim read the passage again. Then he scribbled quickly in his notebook:

William Burton, a plantation owner, died in 1805.

The portrait was painted in 1805.

Patience Burton, the youngest daughter of the family, died in 1805.

Everything happened in that one year.

Had Paige been right all along with her stupid ghost stories? Had the boy and Patience fallen in love and been killed by William? But then, how had William died? And who hid the painting? And why paint the boy in the first place? There were more questions than answers.

He closed the book. Now he knew how the family had made their money, there was one more thing he had to Google.

He went back to the computer and typed ‘slaves in Britain’.

Over three million hits.

He clicked on the first article and read as quickly as he could; a bit about the Romans, the Vikings, the Normans; he scrolled down the page. He slowed down as he reached the eighteenth century and the description of the Triangular Trade. Ships carrying goods sailed from Britain to the west coast of Africa. They traded the goods for slaves, then the slaves were taken to the West Indies and sold to plantation owners. Finally, the ships took sugar and cotton back to Britain – three voyages, three cargoes, three lots of profit. And some of the captains brought personal slaves back to Britain to show off how rich they were.