Nancy’s hands shook as she struggled with the key, but it wouldn’t fit in the lock. For the life of her, why couldn’t she get it in? She thumped the car roof, cursing; her heart thudded against her ribs. She needed to escape. Finally, she managed to open the car door then slammed it shut behind her. She flicked down her door lock; no one was getting in. The sensation of being followed, watched, wouldn’t shake free. It wouldn’t have surprised her to find someone in the backseat. She glanced in the rear-view mirror.
She had to get her boys. Her shaking hands gripped the key and turned it. The engine revved to life, the Hillman Avenger roared up the road and down the right-hand turn where Gloria and the children had walked. A little more than few feet along the road was a thatched pink cottage surrounded by a wide lavender hedge. Nancy parked behind a blue Morris Minor. Breathing deeply, she waited for her heart to settle.
Laughter reached her as she walked towards a white-painted gate.
‘Children playing. What could be more satisfying?’
Nancy ignored the voice. The words were nothing more than poison to tease and tempt her. Instead, she painted a smile on her face and knocked on the door.
‘Around the back,’ Gloria called from the side. ‘Nancy? We’re in the garden. Just follow the path around.’
Nancy followed it, a jiggled array of grey paving that led her to an open garden with the greenest grass. She had almost forgotten what natural, thriving grass looked like. The smell, too—it enlivened her senses with an abundance of lavender, rose bushes, and a large peony shrub. It had no blooms—the flowers of this year were long dead like so much, but all Nancy Hardacre saw was her own peony in full flower, large heads of the deepest crimson.
The memories of all her losses snatched away whatever last shreds of composure she’d been holding on to. She crumbled to her knees, her hands pressed onto the grass and her legs nestled in the thickness of nature. Her heart broke. Her spirit drained. Vast, salty tears puddled by her hands as she sobbed.
‘Oh, Nancy.’ Gloria knelt by her side. ‘Children, go inside, please. Josie, find your colouring things. Why don’t you all draw some lovely pictures?’
The children nodded and ran upstairs with thudding steps, leaving nothing but the sound of heartbreak, raw and desperate. It blocked out the bird song, the cars on the street beyond. Nothing existed but her deepest despair.
Gloria stayed, her hand resting on Nancy’s shoulder. She said nothing. It was what she didn’t say that spoke the loudest.
Eventually, when the tears subsided, Gloria ushered her inside the cottage, closed the bathroom door behind Nancy, and then went to the kitchen. The tiny room was beamed with a crooked door shut with a bar latch. Nancy wanted to stay in there, locked safe in the orange room in the ordinary house, away from all those things that were the contrary. Nancy didn’t dare look in the mirror. She heard the kettle whistle—Gloria was making coffee.
‘Here you go.’ Gloria handed Nancy a coffee. The two women wandered around the garden, holding their mugs close like talismans to ward off their grief.
‘You have a beautiful garden.’ I miss mine, Nancy wanted to add. ‘It’s larger than I expected it to be.’
‘It was the one thing that made us buy it. The cottage needed a lot of work, but the gardens… We saw the magic here.’
Gloria sipped her coffee and stopped close to a length of tall, thick boxwood hedging, running her hands over the small foliage, the leaves flittered between her fingers.
‘Nancy,’ she whispered. ‘Can I trust you?’
The question Nancy had asked no more than an hour before shocked her. What reason did Gloria have to ask? Nancy nodded and put her hand on the woman’s sleeve.
‘Yes, of course.’ Nancy hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
‘Are you one of them?’
‘One of what?’
‘Those.’ There was no need to elaborate. Gloria’s eyes said more, and Nancy read them loud and clear.
‘I’m not. I’m not even a Hardacre, am I?’
‘No, but those boys are.’ Gloria nodded as much to herself as to Nancy. ‘That will never change, no matter what. That place…’
‘Well, we’re not going back there,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve left. We’ll go back to town or another town, or another county. I don’t care. Anywhere but there.’
‘Oh, but you can’t do that.’
‘Whyever not? You know what that place is like. You saw last night; I know you did. You know what lives there.’
‘There’s something I want to show you.’ She stopped, her eyes wide, ‘You need to see this.’
‘Honestly, if it’s another thing like what Beamish gave me, then I’m not interested.’ Nancy stood firm. The heels of her leather boots slowly sank into the soft lawn.
‘What did he give you?’ Gloria shook her head to rid the curiosity from her thoughts. ‘Whatever it was, he’d have a good reason for it.’
‘I didn’t take it. Something about its history. It’s not my task—as I said, I’m not even one of them.’
‘All I know is, that place takes and takes, and it never gives. It’s been the same for generations and…’ The pause stretched between them until it snapped. ‘Even if you are leaving, you need to know what happened. It affects you too.’
‘Is it about my boys?’
‘No.’ Gloria shook her head and narrowed her eyes. ‘In part. It’s more about Andrew.’ His name sparked those hot tears again. Gloria gripped her shoulder, her eyes mirroring the emotion. ‘My husband was Allan.’
Nancy had heard the name but placing it was far beyond her capabilities; the Priory had tainted her ability to think straight. She shrugged.
‘Allan got a telephone call late one night.’ Gloria stopped, her hand on her throat as if to prevent the words from spilling over. ‘At first, we tried to ignore it, but it kept ringing, after three times of trying to get there before they hung up. Allan sat in his pyjamas on the stairs, watching the telephone. I told him to come back to bed, that they would call back in the morning if it was important, but it was like he knew who it was.’
Nancy didn’t have the heart to interrupt. It was a memory Gloria wanted to hold on to or perhaps needed to relive. Nancy understood. There were those mundane snippets of life that her mind replayed over and over simply to feel Andrew again.
‘They did finally call back.’ Gloria gulped. ‘Allan had the receiver to his ear before the second ring. I watched from the landing. I saw the look in his eyes. The colour drained from his face.’ Gloria stared as the vein in Nancy’s temple throbbed, and her jaw stiffened. ‘The call was from someone he’d known when he was a boy.’
Nancy watched her, still none the wiser.
‘It was Andrew.’
‘What?’ Nancy tried to think. Memories mingled and bashed into one another. ‘When was this?’
‘It was in the early hours.’
She pondered, weaved together the tiny threads of information. Nancy froze until it struck her and knocked the air from her lungs.
She nodded. ‘I remember.’
‘Yes. The day Andrew died.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because it was the same day Allan...’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t get it.’ Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades. She realised how warm it was and tugged at her collar, slipping her arms from her jacket. ‘Sorry, Gloria, I feel faint.’
The recall of that night brought Nancy to her knees. Andrew had paced the bedroom, the early moon peering through the window. He had refused to get into bed, his eyes on his hands as he’d constantly run a finger over his palm. She had tried to look at it, see what was bothering him, but he had thrown her a cautious look that warned her off, soon after Nancy had fallen asleep. She’d cursed herself for it every moment since. She had awoken to Oliver shouting and run downstairs with the contents of her stomach in her mouth. The phone receiver had lain discarded on the hall carpet.
Nancy’s hands grew clammy. The mug slipped from her fingers, splashing lukewarm coffee over the hem of her jeans. Gloria helped Nancy out of her jacket and folded it to lay it on the grass.
‘I’ll get you a cloth for that coffee stain.’
Nancy wiped the tears away.
Gloria returned moments later with two folding deckchairs and placed one close to Nancy. ‘Here, sit.’ She did the same with the other chair beside her. ‘And here, this will help.’ She handed Nancy a cloth.
‘No, please. It doesn’t matter. They are already filthy.’ But she took it and mopped up most of the spilt coffee. ‘Thanks.’
Nancy plunged her hands into her front pockets, trying to get comfortable on the deckchair. Her mind still swirled with thoughts of Andrew and late-night phone calls.
‘Come on, Nance. It wouldn’t normally take you this long to catch on.’
‘Can I get you anything else?’ Gloria asked. ‘You look quite pale.’
‘No, honestly, it’s just been a…’ She couldn’t finish the words, but Gloria knew; she could see she was scarcely holding herself together. ‘Tell me about Allan. I’m struggling to make the connection.’
‘He was a gardener.’ Gloria closed her eyes a moment and reached down to the grass as if to feel his presence beneath it. ‘He and Andrew were at school together, best friends for many years.’ She leant in, her hand shielding her mouth. ‘That’s the only reason I’m allowed into the Priory.’ She nodded like it made sense of everything.
Nancy returned the gesture, accompanied by an odd realisation as she pulled her hand from her pocket.
The sun squinted out from behind a grey cloud to reveal a fractured beam that glinted between a thinning weave of the boxwood hedge. A flash caught Nancy. Gloria saw it, too, though she went to great lengths to pretend she had not.
Gloria swept her arm across the manicured lawns and up to the house. ‘Gardens, plants, trees… they were his life. He fed off nature, and in his hands, nature thrived,’ she sighed. ‘He loved his garden.’
‘Andrew was a carpenter.’
‘Two sides of the same, or just the other end of its natural life. Turning what was once glorious by nature to something functional or attractive.’ Gloria nodded. ‘Allan always saw the beauty in that.’
‘Have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,’ Nancy said with a faint smile.
‘Yes, William Morris had it right. No need for the surplus or the ugly.’ Gloria’s eyes shot to where the sun had taken Nancy. This time, there was no denying it as it flashed again.
‘What is it?’ Nancy asked.
‘Something that came home with him earlier that day. It has sat by the shed ever since.’ Gloria wrung her hands in her lap several times until she rubbed her palms on her knees, smoothing out the folds in her green plaid dress. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t want it.’
Nancy had no clue to what she was referring, but the expression on her friend’s face denoted no desire to explain, either.
‘Then can’t you get someone to take it away?’ Nancy asked. ‘What is it?’
‘I want to show you…’ Gloria moved her feet as if to stand. ‘Again, Nancy, I know you’re not one of them, but you must promise me something. Can I trust you to do that?’
Nancy wanted to reply with certainty. She was trustworthy, a good person, yet the fear that this request held more to it petrified her.
‘What is it? Show me what it is.’
Gloria stood and crossed the grass to the hedge. Nancy noticed an opening; a tall wooden archway burrowed inside the foliage, mostly covered by leaves.
‘Come on,’ Gloria said. ‘It’s a piece of the Priory.’
Nancy followed her through the arch but froze when she saw what stood on the other side. A dark-stained wooden shed that still smelled vaguely of creosote and a lean-to porch along one side, in whole no bigger than Gloria’s orange bathroom. Clearly, this had been Allan’s domain. A selection of gardening tools was visible through the window. A tall rake with a painted green handle rested against the padlocked door. Gloria stepped aside to allow Nancy closer and pointed to it.
Propped against the other side of the shed was an object that looked so out of place it may as well have been a door to Narnia. A mirror, tall, wide, with a deeply carved decorative frame; fragments of its gilt finish rubbed and peeled.
Nancy had seen it before, a long time ago.
‘Allan brought it home with him. I have no idea why. I only know it came from the Priory.’ Gloria stood behind Nancy, as far away from the mirror as she could get. Her face turned away, her arms wrapped around herself. ‘I can’t bring myself to look at it, let alone into it.’
‘Did he explain why?’ Nancy’s skin crawled. The Priory’s wispy shadows skulked around her ankles. ‘Nothing good can ever come of a thing that belongs to that place. It would sooner be at home in hell.’
Gloria flinched. ‘You may be right. I, too, know the evil of that place. It must stay where it is. To move it now, well…’
Gloria turned away. She headed back into the bright garden, leaving the Priory’s shadows behind her. Nancy dug her hands deep in her pockets, wondering what the hell this had to do with Andrew, apart from how everything was connected to the Priory. She pulled her hands out, the acorn rolled around her palm.
Then something else caught her attention. It was small and almost hidden by the mirror.
‘Honestly, Nance, what are you going to do with that?’
She bent down to retrieve it. ‘No idea yet,’ she whispered.
Gloria paid no attention to Nancy as she grabbed her folded jacket. Instead, Gloria’s eyes fixed to the top window nestled below the thick thatch. Josie gazed out; one of the boys, too. There was no need to follow their eyes—she knew very well where Josie was looking. She wore the same expression she’d had the evening before on the gallery landing.
Josie saw the evil.