It didn’t take long, come the morning, for Rachel to dismiss the previous night’s events as fantastical. With the clear band of daylight that streamed into her bedroom and the steady wash of the sea, so her lucidity returned. It was obvious, now, that her preoccupation with Alice Miller’s correspondence had put her on edge and had made her hear, and see, things that weren’t there. Her imaginings had got the better of her.
There was no doubt that Winterbourne was kinder in the day. As Rachel pulled on jeans and a shirt, she reflected that the very architecture of the place, especially by night, was enough to play with the most level of heads. At times it felt so isolated that it was possible to believe she was the last person left on earth – that there was nobody else alive, no other people anywhere, just her.
So it was with a concentrated sort of dispassion that Rachel perceived the black stains on her way downstairs. They affected the large arched window on the west front and were so defined, and so at odds with the clear panes adorning every other aperture, that she stopped. She went to touch the glass but the stains were on the outside; and on closer inspection appeared to have some kind of organic matter contained inside them, as if someone had thrown a sack at the window filled with paint, and what appeared to be, though surely couldn’t be, small clumps of fur.
She stepped outside. The day was bracing, encouraging, and she walked round to the west gable, expecting to have to wrench a ladder from the stables in order to decipher the problem – but it transpired to be simpler than that. Rachel saw the dark heap immediately, a queer, localised massacre, and bent to examine it.
Bats. Dozens of them, their bodies crumpled, and when she looked up at the window from this new vantage she could only think that they had flown straight into it. Puzzled, she lifted one of the bats’ wings – it was amazingly light and translucent, and completely without life – and let it drop. It was beyond peculiar. Rachel had been aware of bats at Winterbourne, swooping at dusk and nesting among the gargoyles, but why they should have annihilated themselves in this way was extraordinary.
‘You’re still alive, then.’
She had been so absorbed that she hadn’t heard Jack arrive, and now turned to see his car parked out front. He was leaning against the wall, all six-feet-whatever of him, his big hands in his pockets. ‘I haven’t seen you since Polcreath,’ he said. ‘Wondered if you’d ridden your bike into a ditch.’
‘How thoughtful.’
He peered past her to the bats. ‘That’s a mess,’ he said.
‘No kidding.’
‘What happened?’
‘I have no idea. I just found them.’
Jack crouched to the pile. She saw the patch of lightly greying hair at the tops of his ears and thought it might be attractive, were it not for the rest of him.
‘Poor things must’ve got spooked,’ he said.
‘Does that happen?’
He squinted up at her. ‘I can imagine it happens at Winterbourne.’ Then, with a note of humour, ‘No need to look so worried. Animals are unpredictable. All it takes is one of them to go batty,’ he was pleased at his own joke, ‘and it sets the whole lot of them off. Pack instinct. Or, in this case, colony.’
‘Hmm.’
‘You want help clearing it up?’
She couldn’t say no, and was grateful for the help with the ladder and buckets as they wiped clean the window and heaped the unfortunate bodies on to a shovel. Jack talked the entire time, about his dogs, about his farm, about his sister and her kids who were coming to visit this weekend and how he was preparing himself for a full-scale assault because his nephews never left him alone.
‘Have you got little ones in your family?’ he asked.
Rachel shook her head. ‘I don’t really have any family.’ ‘No?’
‘NO?’ He gestured to the building. ‘What about this lot?’
She leaned on the shovel, and the truth seemed suddenly easy to speak.
‘I never knew them,’ she admitted. ‘I was adopted from England when I was a baby and taken to the States. My adoptive parents are dead now, and I never had any brothers or sisters. Last week I found out about Winterbourne and, well, here I am. I’ve got a chance now to find out about the parents I never met, and their parents, and all of the de Greys. It’s a part of myself I never knew. I still don’t know it. I’m just finding out.’ She stopped. Jack was listening, looking at her deeply, and she felt that she had to say more so she added, ‘It’s nice to hear about busy, bustling families like yours. I always kind of wanted that. Lots of people, lots of love.’
He was still watching her. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I’m sorry, you know, about your adoption.’
‘It was a happy adoption. They were good people.’
‘But I didn’t realise. I’m sorry.’
‘How could you have?’ She smiled. ‘It’s fine. Really.’
He was quieter after that, and they finished the job swiftly. Jack seemed keen to stick around – was there anything else she needed help with? He had the morning free – so she invited him in for a well-earned mug of tea.
‘What’s that doing there?’ he asked inside the hall. Rachel clocked the Elizabethan chest pushed up against the door to the downstairs, and laughed.
‘I got a little freaked in the night,’ she confessed. ‘It was nothing.’
‘It doesn’t look like nothing. How did you move that thing on your own?’
‘I don’t know.’ She conceded it looked impossibly hefty now. ‘But I did.’
‘What’s down there?’
‘The old servants’ rooms. They’re as much of a wreck as you can imagine. I thought I heard something so I followed it down there, but I was mistaken. I hadn’t slept and…’ She trailed off. ‘Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘Those bats against the window, probably.’ Rachel tried to make light of it but Jack regarded her seriously. ‘And then I was down in the cellar, and…’ She shook her head. ‘It was crazy, but I could swear someone was with me.’
‘Someone?’
She wouldn’t have told him, were it not for the way his eyes appeared suddenly kinder and more understanding than they had to her before.
‘A woman,’ she said, recalling the brief flash that her torch had illuminated, the horrible sight that had made her run. If she concentrated, she could pick the image out as clear as day. ‘She was facing the wall. I only saw the back of her, and only for a second… But like I say, it was a trick of the dark. My own shadow, I expect.’
‘Why would she have been facing the wall?’
‘Exactly. It’s insane. There was nobody there. I dreamed it.’
Jack helped her move the chest. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t feel safer keeping it there?’ he teased, and she wanted to say something clever but didn’t. She’d thought he would tease her much more than this and he hadn’t, for which she was grateful.
‘I’m intrigued now,’ he said. ‘Think I should go in and find her?’
‘OK, OK, I’m an idiot.’
‘I’m not saying that. I wouldn’t want to sleep at Winterbourne on my own.’
‘Really?’ She made a face. ‘You don’t seem the type.’
‘What type?’
‘To be afraid of the dark.’
‘I’m not afraid of the dark,’ he said. ‘I might be afraid of what’s in the dark.’
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there is something you can help me with.’
*
The farce of last night’s panic settled ever more firmly on Rachel as they made their way down the servants’ corridor. To think she had skittered up here in fright twelve hours before seemed ridiculous. Who was that girl? Not her. Today the deserted quarters seemed sad rather than spooky, the antique bell box a bruised relic that clearly hadn’t sounded in decades. There was nothing intimidating about it, just dank, leaking walls and the stink of neglect. Another dip and they came to the cellar.
‘There it is,’ said Rachel. Jack went to the stunted door and pushed it.
‘Weird little thing, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Can you open it?’
‘Sure, if you don’t mind it getting wrecked in the process.’
She nodded. The door would have to be sacrificed. It pained her to demolish part of Winterbourne, however minor it was, but she needed to see behind it. She needed it brought to the sensible light of day just as the rest of the house had been.
Jack’s bulk made light work of it, and several shoves later the door broke through. He tore the remaining shards of wood from inside the frame and stood back.
‘Be my guest,’ he said.
Rachel crept inside with the torch. ‘Don’t you dare shut me in,’ she called back, as much to hear the comfort of his reply as for any other reason.
‘And what would I do that with?’
She looked about her. The chamber was as compact as the door had implied, an unevenly shaped room with a low ceiling. She couldn’t think what it had been used for, with space for maybe five or six huddled together. It was incredibly cold.
‘There’s nothing in here.’
‘Great, we can leave.’
‘Oh my god!’
Rachel’s own reflection had almost given her a heart attack – for her torch had crossed a large, oval standing mirror on the opposite wall. Because of the proportions of the room, her image, with its startled expression, had seemed obscenely close.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. A damn mirror – sorry.’
‘What’s a mirror doing in there?’
‘I have no idea. Help me lift it out?’
Jack climbed in and together they tilted the mirror from the wall. It was extremely heavy and an awkward shape to persuade through the access. Nonetheless Rachel felt sure that she didn’t want to leave it there: it was unnerving, the thought of a glass reflecting nothing but the dark, endlessly. ‘Let’s get it upstairs,’ she said. Jack took it from her and went ahead, and when they emerged into the hall he shut the door and spent a few moments mucking about with the catch.
‘There,’ he said, ‘little trick I learned. It’s locked. Feel better?’
‘I felt fine before.’ But she did feel better, a bit.
They examined the mirror, resting glass-out by the fireplace. It resembled a washed-up sea creature, something with many tentacles spewed up on a beach. Rachel had never seen anything so aggressively ornate in her life, and the eccentric shows and private viewings she’d attended made that a bold claim.
‘It’s monstrous,’ said Jack, but Rachel disagreed. There was a theatric beauty about the mirror that fitted utterly with Winterbourne. Its gothic frame was elaborate, bringing to mind a nest of snakes or else a tangle of foliage, parts of which appeared sharp enough to cause injury. The glass was blemished by age and the whole thing as tall and wide as she was. Like so much else at Winterbourne, she wished she could take it back to her gallery, imagined it as the centrepiece for a new exhibition.
‘It looks like it belongs to a wicked queen,’ she said.
Jack nudged her. ‘It does now.’
‘I don’t like myself in it. Don’t you think we look strange?’
‘This is just what we look like.’
But she thought they did look strange. It was curious to consider that the glass had lain hidden and unused all this time – who knew for how long? – and now it had finally opened its observant eye, here, in this hall, and was witnessing them as keenly as they witnessed it. ‘Do you think it belonged to Constance?’ said Rachel.
‘I doubt it belonged to her father. The brother was a bit alternative, though.’
Rachel turned to him. ‘Do you ever take anything seriously?’
‘Of course I do.’ He smiled at her. ‘The serious stuff.’
‘I ought to hang it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where.’
‘It’d look good on the fire. Nice bit of kindling, that frame.’
She folded her arms. ‘You’re suggesting I burn a mirror. How many years of bad luck would that be?’
‘This one looks like it’d curse you for eternity.’
She laughed, then went to the mirror and ran her fingers over the loops and spikes that made up its surround. ‘I just feel it wants to be hung, don’t you?’
‘I feel I want that cup of tea.’
They went to the kitchen to make it. Jack sat at the table.
‘Thanks for coming up,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m glad you did.’
‘I’ve no doubt.’ He drank his tea fast again, even though it had just been poured. ‘Bats and cellars and mirrors – it’s quite The Castle of Otranto up here.’
‘Since when have you read The Castle of Otranto?’ She grinned, then realised how she came across. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded patronising.’
‘Because it was patronising,’ said Jack. ‘Just because I don’t go in for art galleries.’
‘You could go in for both.’
‘I’d go in for yours.’
She blushed.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I came up because I figured you probably wouldn’t be here for much longer. In fact, I thought you might already have gone.’
‘Not that I’d ridden my bike into a ditch?’
‘Or that.’
‘As it goes, I’ve decided to stick around.’ She decided to be straight with him. ‘The reason I was exhausted last night was because I found some letters in de Grey’s study. Letters my grandparents wrote, secret letters that no one else was supposed to read, and now I can’t get them out of my mind. I’m trying to piece stuff together, my history, and this is just the beginning. I need to know what happened here and where my mother wound up. I need to know if she was OK.’
‘What about your job? What about your boyfriend?’
‘My job will survive. I have a good team.’
‘And your boyfriend?’
‘Shut up, Jack.’ But she smiled.
They were pulled from the moment by a polite knocking at the door. Rachel went to answer it, as Jack pulled on his coat and said, ‘I’d better get going.’
When she opened it, with Jack behind her, for a moment the person waiting there made no sense at all. It was a woman in a skirt suit with a satchel over one shoulder. Her hair was coiffed and her lips were pink and she looked hopelessly out of place and hopelessly optimistic. She must have come to the wrong place.
As if Winterbourne could be mistaken for the wrong place.
‘I’m Wanda Pearlman,’ the woman said, extending her manicured hand with a quiver of excitement. ‘I’m a director with Brightside Estates in Polcreath, and may I take this opportunity to say what a thrill and a privilege it is to be selling your home.’