RED RIGG HOUSE was the biggest house Ashley had ever seen – to her, ‘house’ did not seem the right word at all. This building looked more like her school, with all its windows and the way it stretched out across the gravel. Their coach had stopped at the bottom of the driveway, and the children had all piled out, spilling into the warm spring sunshine in a cacophony of exclamations and questions. Mr Haygarth, one of the supervisors, was trying to get them to form two lines, but it was a thankless task. The children were all from inner-city schools, most of them never having left the south of England before, and the landscape around them seemed fantastical. Great, dramatic hills had been visible through the windows all the way from the train station, and behind the house itself, there was what Ashley thought had to be a mountain; an immense craggy pile of grass and rock, gorse and wood. To Ashley, it looked like a place from a fairy story – it made her think of the school for boy wizards from a series of books she had read from the library. It looked like the sort of place Chrestomanci would live.
When Mr Haygarth and his counterpart, Miss Lyonnes, had managed to get the children inside, they were finally awed into silence. The foyer of Red Rigg House was huge and beautiful, with darkly polished wood gleaming in all directions. The tiles under their feet were green and decorated with slyly smiling moon faces. At the back of the room was a great sweeping staircase that led up to the next floor, splitting off into the east and west wings. It was at the bottom of these stairs that a small group of people were waiting to greet the children; an old man, a middle-aged woman, and a boy and a girl who looked to be in their late teens – perhaps two or three years older than Ashley herself.
‘Here we are,’ Mr Haygarth was saying. He was a twitchy young man in his twenties with a strawberry-blond beard and a tendency to blush intensely at a moment’s notice. He was already bright pink with the stress of getting the children into the house. ‘Children, this is Lord Lyndon-Smith, whose house this is, and who is very kindly allowing you all to stay for the weekend. Say hello.’
The children muttered and shuffled their feet. Ashley found herself looking at the two kids on the stairs; like the house itself, it seemed to her that they belonged in a book, or a film. Both of them were strikingly attractive, with the same silky black hair and creamy skin. The boy was slightly taller than the girl, who looked enough like him that they had to be siblings, and he was wearing a pair of dark grey trousers with a pale green shirt. Ashley couldn’t believe a teenager would wear trousers outside of a school day. The girl was slim and beautiful, with big dark eyes and a pink stain to her lips. She was wearing a crisp white blouse under a short, dark blue velvet jacket, and she was also wearing trousers, with a narrow silver belt at her waist. The entire outfit made Ashley think of the strangely dressed little men that waved sheets of red fabric at enraged bulls.
‘Welcome, you are very welcome,’ the old man was saying. He was short and rather egglike, with a pair of round spectacles on the end of his nose. He was beaming at the children, apparently delighted. ‘These are my grandchildren, Richard and Malory.’ He nodded to the two teens, who looked as if they would rather be anywhere else. ‘They will be hosting you. And this is my daughter, Biddy.’
There was a ripple of laughter at this, and the middle-aged woman in the middle of the group frowned slightly. Of all of them, Ashley mistrusted this one. She had a narrow, pinched face and rigidly curled hair that made Ashley think of an old, much-hated prime minister.
When the pleasantries were over, the children were ushered out of the foyer and up the stairs. Malory Lyndon-Smith led them through the east wing, down dark-panelled corridors lined with framed paintings and small tables holding vases of fresh flowers. Eventually, they came to a large high-ceilinged room at the far end of the wing, which contained two neat rows of beds lining the walls. Long windows looked out onto the towering hill behind the house, and Ashley’s shoes sunk into the soft red carpet. Everything was very clean and very neat, yet the room made her uneasy. She looked around, thinking she might spy one of the Heedful Ones, crouched in a corner or standing half-hidden by a curtain. But there was nothing. Mr Haygarth was encourageing them to pick a bed, so Ashley wandered over to one and put her rucksack at the foot of it. Around her, the kids who had come with others from their schools or who had made new friends on the coach journey were excitedly rushing to claim bunks next to each other. Ashley watched them with a familiar pain in the back of her throat. She did not make friends easily. Most of the time it felt simpler to keep quiet and pretend that she was happier alone.
‘This room used to be for convalescents.’
Ashley turned, surprised to see the girl, Malory, standing beside her. Up close, the teenager was even more arresting. There was a tiny mole under her left eye, which drew more attention to the sooty thickness of her lashes.
‘It was?’
Malory looked at her closely.
‘Do you know what “convalescent” means?’
‘A sick person,’ said Ashley. ‘When you’re ill for ages, and it takes a while to get better. I’m not an idiot just ’cause I’m from London.’
Malory raised her eyebrows, impressed. People often were impressed with Ashley’s vocabulary, which seemed to range far and wide and included words most fourteen-year-olds weren’t familiar with. When she had been little, one of Ashley’s favourite parts of school was the Word Wall and the Word Tin. There had been a stand in the corner of her classroom with hundreds of words written on thick cardboard tabs. Every day, the children would go to the wall and choose five words to take home and learn, either on their own or with attentive parents. Ashley had zoomed through the wall, getting the teacher’s permission to take extra words, until eventually the teacher herself began writing out new ones, just for Ashley. It was how she had learned what ‘heedful’ meant, and how it might apply to the strange figures she saw everywhere, their blank faces always watching.
‘After the First World War, some of the soldiers that came back had shell shock, and for a while, Red Rigg House was one of the places that they came to get better. What’s your name?’
It took Ashley a moment to answer. She was imagining the soldiers, still in their uniforms, lying prone in the dormitory beds. They were missing arms and legs; they were crying for their mums.
‘Ashley. My name’s Ashley Whitelam.’
‘Do you know anyone here, Ashley?’
Ashley looked up at the older girl, that tight feeling growing in her throat. She didn’t mind not having friends, not really, as long as no one else noticed.
‘No,’ she said, very quietly.
Malory smiled. ‘Don’t worry.’ She reached out and took hold of a length of Ashley’s pale hair, running it gently through two of her fingers. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for you.’