When Ellie called round the following afternoon carrying her roller skates, it took the sisters a moment to get used to her being a couple of inches shorter.
‘It’s my birthday Saturday,’ she bubbled excitedly on Pillowell’s doorstep. ‘I’m going to be ten years old.’
‘We know.’ Caroline yawned. ‘It’s all you’ve gone on about.’
‘Here,’ Ellie said, ignoring Caroline and beaming at Joanna. ‘These are for you.’ And she handed over her old roller skates.
‘You’re not wearing them now.’ Caroline was fearful of being left out. ‘We agreed, we’re going to the church today to show Ellie the Book of the Dead – even though I still can’t believe no one told you it was there. You still want to see it, don’t you?’
Ellie nodded, but looked unsure.
The girls followed a narrow footpath that eventually widened into a meadow. Wedged between woodland shimmering silver under the bullying heat, the way ahead was littered with dead trees, vast as dinosaurs, stretched out in the tussocky grass. Scattering a cluster of nervous ewes, the cries of lambs almost as big as their mothers, they watched them in the pearly light. They liked the sheep; liked the snags of wool they left behind on the briar and bramble, and equated their muzzles to the downy heads of sow thistle Mrs Hooper identified in the hedgerow.
‘D’you like butter?’ Ellie plucked a sunny buttercup, held it under Joanna’s chin and was in the middle of confirming she did when a rabbit bounded out from a patch of waist-high thistles. Fascinated, they didn’t dare move as it rested on its back legs and surveyed its surroundings. Until one of them sneezed. An involuntary sound that triggered the rabbit’s quick-flash reaction, and it bolted to safety.
‘Oh, look … ’ Skipping along without her wheels, Ellie jabbed the air. ‘A bunch of cows.’
‘Herd of cows,’ Caroline corrected.
‘Course I’ve heard of cows.’ Ellie, suitably insistent. ‘I just said – there’s a bunch of them over there.’
Placid and liquid-eyed, the cows stood guard over their dozing offspring, swishing their rope-like tails. The Jameson sisters were wary, and wrinkled their urban noses at the plate-sized dung pats, admitting that apart from the horses, they’d only seen creatures this huge behind bars at Regent’s Park Zoo. Ellie was familiar with these farm animals and it was good to have the upper hand for a change. Sensitive to Joanna’s wariness towards her sister, she too had a tendency to tiptoe around Caroline, a little afraid of the girl that her mother warned ‘had a mood that could spin on a sixpence’.
‘It is all right, isn’t it?’ Joanna queried. ‘Dora said to watch out if the cows have got babies with them.’
‘It will be if we get a sodding move on.’ Caroline, in control again, whisked them through an excited swarm of midges and onwards to the church, its spire spearing the mantle of trees, skewering it to the heavens.
At the sound of a strimmer from the perimeters of the churchyard, the children rotated their heads in unison to see Frank Petley, with large sweat stains drenching the underarms of his shirt. He was giving the nettles and brambles snaking in from the wild their monthly going over and lifted his goggles to sneak a look in their direction. Not that they acknowledged him, preferring to throw their gazes to the high-sided vicarage, to the top-floor window and Cecilia Mortmain, who was always there. Caroline raised a timid hand to Cecilia, her heart ballooning with joy to have her wave reciprocated. She smiled at the silliness of things, the smallness of things: things that meant the world to a girl who believed herself unlovable. And with a squeeze of pity for the pretty lady who didn’t look well, Caroline thought of her sitting alone, watching the world turn from her upstairs room, and half-wondered if she should call round one day and see her.
Beyond its vast storm doors, the church smelled of damp stone, its breath cold from years of failed prayers and soul-searching. This was where God was hiding, they thought independently, and stepped inside. The book Caroline was keen to share with their summertime companion was as heavy as an infant. And, establishing the coast was clear – the tallest and always in charge – she balanced aboard the rickety stool Tilly Petley sat on to turn Mrs Hooper’s sheet music. In grave danger of overreaching herself, she wobbled from side to side as she stretched to tug the book from its tomb of greasy hymn books and pigeon droppings. Joanna and Ellie waited, hands clamped like limpets to their mouths, trapping the anxiety that always trembled in their throats when they were with Caroline.
Ellie and Joanna tasted the dust and mouldiness as they watched their leader climb the pulpit and lower the book on the lectern. Looking over her shoulder as pages were turned on a gruesome world none of them fully understood, they listened to Caroline embroidering its history the way Dora had done, repeating the remembered words to explain the fetish the Victorians had with photographing their dead.
‘These were the people who died when part of the tunnel collapsed on them,’ she informed Ellie, enjoying the way her voice rang out authoritatively as she identified the frilled collars and caps, the neatly combed hair, the silt-blackened nostrils. How some had their eyelids closed in readiness for the stuttering camera lens, while others stared blindly with expressions of wonderment and awe. ‘They were scrubbed clean of the rock and mud that suffocated them, then dressed in borrowed finery and photographed to meet their maker.’
All Joanna could think through her sister’s drone was how utterly dead they were; these mothers and fathers and children and babies. But what were children and babies doing in the tunnel, she had wanted to ask, but there was no one to ask, and she wanted Caroline to shut up. Death was a place, she thought, a far away, shifting place where these people had gone. It was where her father had gone, and she would go there one day and see him again. It was probably what her mother believed too, except she just wanted to get there more quickly, Joanna supposed, and that’s why she took those tablets.
Caroline, in contrast, thought it marvellous that such ordinary people could be transformed into beautiful, sleeping angels after suffering such brutal ends. She hoped someone would dress her up in pretty things when she died, and wondered why no one thought to take pictures of their father after he’d been pulled from the sea.
Equally fascinated, Ellie looked on without a sound. Unflinching and not the least perturbed by the peculiar ensembles of families as dead-eyed as the dolls she played with at home. They were neatly arranged on plush upholstery, leaning into one another on tasselled cushions and throws, the likes of which these poor dead souls would never have known when living. Only when Caroline turned the final plate and Ellie saw what lay buried between the last page and its hardback cover, did her stomach tighten.
A Polaroid of Ellie on her roller skates. Taken only two days ago. Joanna recognised her bubble-gum pink legwarmers and pinpointed it exactly. Startling, unsettling and wrong; the shock made Ellie’s heart beat faster. What did it mean? No one spoke; each seemingly as frightened as the others to touch the incongruous square of plastic as they were to break the spell of unexpected pure, white light pouring in through the large plain windows. A light so bright it bleached out shadow. Caroline whipped the Polaroid out, then shut the book; the creak of its cover reverberated through the hush that closed over them like the lid of a coffin.
A scrape of furniture and the door to the vestry opened behind them, making them jump. They’d assumed they were alone, and panicking, thinking they needed to replace the book before there were questions – questions none of them wanted to answer – they dived from the pulpit and charged back down the aisle, and once Caroline had returned the book to its bed of bird droppings with far less drama, raced out into the sunshine. But in their mad rush to get away, Caroline dropped the Polaroid: something she realised as the church door thudded shut, trapping the murmuring voices of a man and a woman there wasn’t the time to turn around to see.
‘Why was there a photo of me in that book?’ Ellie, round-eyed and pale, stared out on a world no one had prepared her for. ‘I don’t remember it being taken – I don’t understand.’
When the children left the church, silence was restored. Setting aside the red tartan blanket he’d been folding, Reverend Timothy Mortmain stepped into the aisle. With muddied turn-ups and twigs in his hair from his yomp through the trees, his soft-soles slapped against the muffled serenity of his domain.
He’d been watching the children from the depths of the woods, and then from the shadows provided by his vestry door. Such a shame the younger two seemed put off by the macabre contents of the book, unlike the older one, who’d been back to the church many times since Dora first showed it to her and her sister. He might not mind the intrusion so much if the younger ones came with her. They really were such pretty little girls.