The week passes in a state of high tension. Winterbourne feels like a storm about to break, the air charged with unknowable forces. I see the captain only once, standing alone on the Landogger Bluff, during my afternoon walk with the children.
‘Isn’t that Father?’ Constance asks me. ‘What is he doing?’ I wish I knew. But the more intense and isolated Captain de Grey becomes, the more he enthralls me.
‘Come along,’ I say hurriedly, ‘your father will be in presently.’
It is an effort to hide my craving from the children, and from Mrs Yarrow. Each time the captain arises in conversation I must turn away, for surely my racing heart will give me away. They seem not to notice, for which I am grateful.
On Wednesday, after breakfast, we have a fright. The last I saw of the children was my dismissal of them and instruction to go and dress; but thirty minutes later I am still waiting in the classroom. I go to Mrs Yarrow. ‘Have you seen them?’ I ask.
‘No, miss. I thought they were with you.’
Together, we ascend to the twins’ bedroom and their beds are neatly made; the clothes I laid out for them last night are not in evidence.
‘Well, at least the mites are dressed,’ says Mrs Yarrow, in that mistrustful tone I have become used to, seeming to suggest that the children are engaged in some unsavoury activity, with us as the butts of their joke. I do not address her disloyalty for now is not the time. Instead I say, ‘Perhaps they’re with Tom.’
We find Tom outside, up a ladder, clearing the rain gutter of leaves. He climbs down when he sees us, but confesses he’s had no sight of them either.
‘Oh, Lordy!’ Mrs Yarrow wrings her hands.
‘Keep your head, Mrs Yarrow,’ I say, ‘there will be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’ I am just praying that explanation arrives before Captain de Grey does, for I feel his eyes on me again, watching me all the time, everywhere, always.
‘They wouldn’t ’a’ gone downstairs, would they?’ says Tom.
‘Downstairs?’
He nods. ‘To the cellar.’
‘Why on earth would they do that?’
‘The girl was talking about a mirror,’ Tom says. ‘She wanted to show you, miss.’ He pauses, averts his gaze, and his next words are an effort. ‘It were a mirror of Madam’s,’ he manages. ‘All her things were moved down there after she left.’
‘It’s true,’ says Mrs Yarrow. ‘The captain wanted them out of sight, all of Madam’s possessions. We don’t use those rooms any more, in any case.’
The three of us hurry inside and head for the bowels of the house. I haven’t ventured this way since Tipper led Henry and me on a mission, the first time the doctor visited, and it smells as dank and disused as it did then. Down the servants’ corridor and getting closer to that weird room with the diminutive entrance, we hear the tinkle of children’s laughter. ‘There they are!’ I cry. ‘I hear them!’
I am surprised to find the strange, small door open, and it strikes me as odd that the children should be giggling if what Tom said was true and they are sitting surrounded by their dead mother’s belongings. Was that what Tipper was barking at, just a trove of old effects? Why was he so afraid? I long to creep inside and touch the fabrics this woman wore, to glimpse the life she led, but then the laughter stops and the children appear at the hatch. The light is so faded that it is hard to make out their shapes, but I would know my children anywhere.
‘Help us,’ urges Edmund, ‘Tom!’
Now I see why. They are attempting to carry a considerable weight and as its outline appears through the alcove I see it is the mirror. Laura de Grey’s mirror.
I rush to help and between us we wrench the glass through. Mrs Yarrow falls back, disapproving, and I ought to share her disapproval but cannot, for the intrigue is too great for me to contest. Tom stands the mirror and for a moment we all gaze at it, as if a new person has joined us. It is oval in shape, the glass plain enough but the frame is beguiling. It is twisted and black like a froth of serpents, or the head of Medusa, and one has the sensation of reaching to touch it and one of its tentacles coming alive in one’s hands. It reminds me of the mural in my room – that writhing greenery – where I cannot trace a stem of it without becoming lost.
My vision of Laura at her dressing table was wrong. She was not sitting but standing. The beauty of her head alone was not enough.
Constance snivels. She was not laughing in there, but crying!
I kneel to her. ‘What is it, darling?’
‘This was my mummy’s,’ she says.
‘I know it was. But you hoped to find it? Tom said you did.’
Constance nods. ‘Edmund promised he’d help me. I wanted to see it again. May we bring it upstairs, Alice, please? I don’t like it being down here. It isn’t happy down here.’ I look up at the others, at Mrs Yarrow and Tom, and they are doubtful.
‘The captain won’t like it,’ says Tom.
I stand, smoothing my skirt. The captain’s rage flies towards me on wings made of gold. ‘I am sure he’ll understand once I explain it to him.’
*
The private reprimand I am hoping for doesn’t arrive; instead, we are all of us present when the captain sees the excavated mirror, and all of us are subject to his anger.
Anger, though, is not nearly the right word. Instead the captain receives our find as if absorbing a blow to the stomach: quiet, controlled and steady.
‘Constance wishes to keep it here, in the hall,’ I say.‘Could we?’
The captain eyes each of us in turn. I can hear Mrs Yarrow’s protests without her needing to speak: ‘It weren’t me, Captain, I didn’t want anything to do with it, it’s a horrible thing anyway; forgive me, Captain, it were the children’s doing, the children and her!’ He watches the mirror carefully, as if it is an old adversary.
The children no longer hold my hands; they have stepped away from me. Edmund’s glance flits over me: a shiver of conspiracy passes through the hallway then disappears. ‘Mummy used to brush her hair in it,’ says Constance faintly.
The captain’s shoulders drop, surrendering to a great exhale.
‘Very well,’ he says, ‘you may keep it above stairs. But not here.’ He doesn’t have to say: Not here where I can see it. Not here where I must be reminded of her.
‘In Alice’s room,’ says Constance, as if this has been the plan all along.
Startled, I turn to her.
‘Alice will take the mirror,’ she goes on, and there is that quiver of collusion again; I cannot put my finger on it. ‘Then we can see it any time we like. Alice will look perfect in it. Don’t you think, Father? It’s a waste for it to be hidden away.’
‘Come now, children,’ I object, ‘I wouldn’t assume—’
‘If she wishes it,’ says the captain, meeting my eye with his cold blue glare.
I cannot speak. The mirror observes me. The children are pleased.
Tom lifts the glass with some effort. Leaving behind our companions, we take it to my room. ‘Is here all right?’ he asks, settling it by the window.
‘That’s fine. Thank you, Tom.’
Before he leaves, he asks, ‘You’re sure about this, miss?’
‘It is the children’s wish,’ I answer; ‘I am happy to entertain it.’
‘Mrs de Grey used to love that mirror.’ He hesitates. ‘She’d be in front of it every day – obsessed, she was – brushing her hair or admiring the new clothes the captain bought for her. But she hated it by the end. She weren’t at all keen on it by then. Said it gave her a fright.’
‘Well, I’m not about to let a rusted antique do such a thing to me.’
‘Of course not, miss.’
I am relieved when he goes and I am alone, looking at myself in the glass and liking how it makes a grander person of me. I find myself smiling, despite the strain of the morning, and a warm beam of sunshine pools on the floor around my ankles.
Oh, but that is a most peculiar thing.
The painting on the wall has changed. I move closer, to make sure, and when I see what has happened I gasp, blood rising in my chest. The last time I saw the girl in the picture, she was most definitely inside the farmhouse. Now, she is outside.
It cannot be.
Alarmed, I take a step back. Something horrible is caught in my throat. I must be seeing things – or else this is a different picture, swapped without my knowledge, without my being here, but then by whom? I cannot move, dread pinning me to the spot, and it is not so much my dread at the image itself coming alive as it is at the possibility that I am the one moving: that my mind has moved her, somehow. That I am not as well as I think I have been. That my mind is failing me again.
You’re perfectly fine, Alice, I tell myself. Stop daydreaming.
Gently I touch the girl’s portrait with my finger, expecting what I do not know – warmth, breath, for the tip of my finger to penetrate its surface? It is cool, the oils decades old and rippled with age, and when I peer in I see that she is not looking to me at all, but instead to the mirror at my back, as if stepping near to see herself in it.
*
It is with difficulty that we pass the morning in study, for I cannot prevent my mind from wandering away from the drawing room, upstairs to the mirror and the impossible painting, or else down to the cellar and towards Laura’s belongings. The cellar seems to call to me, pulsing with promise, seducing me with secrets it has yet to reveal. Laura is the key. If I could just find out what happened to her…
At lunchtime, with the twins playing outside, Mrs Yarrow is pale, her eyes rimmed. ‘Oh, miss,’ she says wearily, ‘the time has come. I cannot bear it any more.’
‘You cannot bear what?’
‘Here. Winterbourne. The children. Danger is coming.’
I turn to her. ‘Mrs Yarrow?’
The cook folds a heap of towels in order to avoid looking at me. ‘When I said before about moving on, miss, I meant it. My sister works for a house up in Norfolk. There’s an opening there in the kitchen, the pay is good and the family fair—’
‘Winterbourne needs you,’ I object. ‘You can’t leave.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ she says, ‘to begin with. But Winterbourne has never been right, miss; it wasn’t right with Madam, and I dare say it wasn’t right before.’
I scoff. ‘Mrs Yarrow, this is lunacy.’
‘No,’ she cuts me off, ‘I’ll tell you what is lunacy. That boy and that girl. They’re lunacy. Haven’t you seen the way they look at you?’
I push my plate away. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘They’re laughing at you. Don’t you see? They used to laugh at me, but now they have you to play with. You can think what you like, miss, about why they are the way they are, you can think of the excuses you want. But I know the truth.’
‘Then speak it!’
‘They’re wrong, those children. They’ve put a spell on this place – or else it’s put a spell on them. I’ve pretended long enough that I can stand it. But Winterbourne is slipping away, miss: the old Winterbourne, the Winterbourne I knew. It belongs to the twins now, and there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do about it.’
‘It’s their home, Mrs Yarrow,’ I say tightly.
‘Indeed. But I used to have a home here too. I used to run this house, but now the twins run everything: their father, Tom, you. All that business with Edmund running away in the mist, their feigning illness, their disobedience, then today the mirror! Oh, miss, surely you see, with the mirror—’
‘Mrs Yarrow, I will not hear it.’ I stand and turn to leave, unable to hear her poisonous words. ‘If you believe such lies then perhaps it is best if you go.’
‘It was better, before they were born,’ blathers the cook, her fingers shaking so that she buries them in her apron, but still her voice quavers. ‘They made their mother sick – sick in the head! Madam told me she could not stand to touch them!’
‘Mrs Yarrow!’
‘Madam died and then the other woman died. I will not let it happen to me—’
I strike my fist on the table. How dare Mrs Yarrow cast such aspersions on the cherubs who play on the lawn? Through the window I see the twins frolicking on the grass, Edmund’s copper curls like a harp of gold and Constance’s skirts bouncing as she leaps. I will not give the cook audience. She has already tempted me towards doubting the children once and I will not let her again. I know better now. It is a pity she does not. ‘Enough,’ I say evenly. ‘I ought to report your words to the captain.’
‘All that business with Madam’s mirror, don’t you see their trick?’
‘They miss their mother. They should be comforted, not chastised.’
‘That were Madam’s mirror but it turned against her in the end. She did not like herself in it by the time she died.’
‘Was she sick? Her appearance changed?’
Mrs Yarrow says no, not quite, perhaps, in a way.
‘The children sense it,’ she says. ‘They can’t have known it, they were young, but they sense it. I saw how they dragged that thing out from its den. Didn’t you hear their laughter, miss, down in the cellar? They want you to have the mirror. Or else something in this house told them to give it to you.’
‘I will not listen!’
‘Ask yourself why, miss. Why did they give it to you?’
‘Because they love me, Mrs Yarrow!’
That succeeds in quieting her, though I wish I hadn’t said it. It is a private wish, close to a belief, and I am not ready to share it.
‘You are a fool, if that is what you suppose.’
‘Why shouldn’t I suppose it? You speak gibberish; that mirror is a piece of glass and nothing more: a gift, and a striking one, from them to me. Don’t you see that I am the closest thing they have to a mother now? I dote on them, never doubt it, and never doubt that I will defend those children with my life if the occasion arises.’
Mrs Yarrow turns from me, her hands braced on the rim of the sink.
‘You are not their mother,’ she says warningly. ‘You are not the mistress of Winterbourne. You must never imagine yourself to be such. This house will not have it. That was the mistake the woman before you made.’
‘She can’t have made it,’ I say tightly. ‘Or she would never have left them.’
The cook remains where she is. So do I.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Yarrow,’ I say, and head out to find the children.
*
We finish lessons early. I see the strain the day’s activities have taken on Edmund and Constance, and find myself longing to get out of the house. That’s the way with Winterbourne: its atmosphere changes as fast as the breeze on the Landogger Bluff.
‘To your room, darlings; you can finish your work there.’
The children do as they’re told and I seize my coat from the hall.
‘Are you heading out, miss?’ asks Tom, as we pass each other in the porch. ‘There’s heavy rain coming in, be warned.’
‘Thank you, Tom.’
But I pay no heed to a spot of rain, and instead walk out over the parkland, through the tall grasses and towards the cliffs. I position myself in the windswept spot where I saw the dark-dressed woman and let my gaze fall to the beach, half hoping I will find her there, a staggering black shape, crawling, crawling towards the sea…
But the sand is empty. Gloomy clouds heap on the horizon. I wonder how close their last governess stood before she stepped over the brink. Did she put one toe over first? Did she brace herself like a diver, or tumble like a ragdoll? Was she afraid?
It makes me envious to imagine her with the children, with the captain, playing at the role I now hold dear. Mrs Yarrow knows not of what she speaks. I am different. Winterbourne knows I am different. This house is my salvation.
I have been too focused on the dead and not focused enough on the living. Inside Winterbourne is a living, breathing man – it makes me shudder to think of him – and two children who need my love. Henry Marsh asked if I believed in ghosts. No, I do not. I cannot. I would already have been hunted to my grave.
I turn from the sea to head back to the house, but then I spy the low line of the stables and am drawn in that direction instead. The rain has started to spit, stinging my cheeks. I gather my coat. Above, thunder rolls across the darkening sky.
Storm is sheltering in the warm enclosure. I stroke her ears and mane and a light in her eyes catches mine. Before I can think better of it – because given another minute, surely I would – I unbolt the door and locate the reins, long unused, suspended in a tangle from a rafter. There is no saddle but I prefer it that way.
‘She wants to be ridden. She hasn’t been ridden in years…’
I loop the reins around Storm’s neck and she accepts them gratefully, dancing her hooves with anticipation. My heart beats wildly; my throat is dry.
‘Mummy would have liked you to. Mummy would ask you, if only she could…’
‘Come along, girl,’ I say. ‘Come along, Storm.’
I lead her out and she follows on unsteady legs, head flicking against the rain. The white in her mane reminds me she is old but seeing her out of the stable, against the roll of the Cornish moors, she strikes me as a new animal. The muscles in her legs and flanks are ready to work, eager to run. Out of sight of the house, I mount her. Her coat is quickly soaked. The rain falls torrentially now, huge drops that hang from my eyelashes and nose. My coat is drenched and my hat seeping so I throw it on to the grass. With my thighs I grip the horse’s sides, clasping the leather straps in my hand.
‘Yah!’ I shout, kicking back my heels. The beast springs from under me. I have never flown but I imagine that this is how it feels to fly. Storm seems to know the terrain, as well she might, and together we soar across the heath, the rain whirling and spinning from the sky. I kick harder, keeping her speed, and we move so fast it seems entirely plausible that we are ready to step up into the heavens… It is too fast, I know, and to come across a ditch or rut would throw me clean over the edge, but I don’t care. I am free. I am flying. I am wetted through and it makes me alive. I am not sure if I have ever felt alive, not like this. I can leave it all behind, my childhood, my crime, my doomed romance and the future I lost. Those were the things that brought me here, to Winterbourne. This house has shown me I can have it yet: I too can be happy. I too can know love. I too can claim my chance. Nothing can catch me now, not riding Storm in the driving rain, the rhythm of our bodies working against the other, the horse’s hooves churning the ground and our hearts racing in tandem.
I could be her, I think. Laura de Grey of Winterbourne.
And, for a moment, I am.
I am Laura.
The thought sends such a primitive thrill through me that I have to tug the reins to bring Storm to a slower pace. The horse wheezes and chuffs but she is as exhilarated as I, her chest pumping and her muscles straining for more.
We turn back to the house, now an outline in the distance. I recall Mrs Yarrow’s words to me when I first arrived at Winterbourne, when she first told me of her intended departure:
‘You’ll be the woman of this house next, miss. And you’ll like it.’
I tilt my face to the sky and allow the rain to take me. I open my mouth and let it come inside. For an instant the arc above me illuminates in a flash of lightning, white and shocking, then there is the answering call of thunder.
I twitch the reins and we move off, galloping back towards the house.
*
Storm is returned to the stables and I am walking, dripping, to Winterbourne when I stop. I see a silhouette in the chapel’s arched window. It is the captain.
‘Miss Miller.’ He steps out. The pouring rain slices across my vision, blurring his edges, smoothing his features, so his burns are scarcely visible. He looks at me with those cool blue eyes, his black hair soaked in moments. ‘Come.’
I am reminded of a story I read as a child. He is the wolf. I am the flesh he wishes to bite. Inside, the rebuke I am expecting both thrills and dismays me.
‘I saw you,’ he says quietly, ‘out with Storm.’ The rolling sky echoes his displeasure. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’
‘Captain, I…’ But there is no justification for what I did. I wanted to be caught. I wanted this. I wanted him, and me, and to feel the force of his rage.
‘I granted you acquittal over the mirror,’ he says, ‘but this? Taking my dead wife’s horse, when you are aware of how much she means to me?’ It isn’t clear whether he means Laura or the animal. I suppose it makes no difference.
‘I’m sorry. I saw Storm and I wanted her to run—’
‘You had no right!’ The captain turns to the chapel altar and for a wild second I believe he is going to drop to his knees, before he whirls back round to face me. His features are contorted, his eyes savage. I have never been so attracted to a man before in my life. ‘Nothing you say can make this better. There are no excuses.’
Your daughter told me to. I could say it. Just as I could say that Edmund lured me out that day in the mist. Just as I could say that they depicted me as Jonathan’s bride, so he would see me that way and imagine us together. Just as they wanted me to have their mother’s mirror, so I could be more like her, so I could assume my place as mistress of Winterbourne. That the children are, it would seem, moving us together like a pawn and a king in a game of chess. They want it. They have plotted it since the moment I entered the house. It is they I can thank for these intimate encounters, they who have stoked the fire of their father’s passion and placed me in front to feel its warmth. They wish for him to capture me, and now I am but one square away.
Behind the captain, the crucifixion bears down. Even in dark daylight, the stained glass of the chapel windows glows with punishment. I shiver, the rain coursing now off my chin and the ends of my hair, snaking down my neck.
‘Do you know the worst part?’ It is almost a groan, heavy with regret and an attempt to restrain some other feeling, harder for me to pinpoint. ‘You looked just like her.’ The captain steps towards me; instinctively, I step back. I say nothing. ‘Out there on the moors,’ he says, ‘it was like seeing Laura again. As if you were her ghost.’
My skin is freezing. Goosebumps prickle my back. Yet there is heat within me too, and heat seems to come off the captain, and still I am unable to speak.
There are no words to defend my actions and besides I do not wish to defend them. I wish to be Laura, just as he described me. The chapel flashes with lightning.
‘You devilish creature,’ he rasps – and then he comes towards me and takes my chin in his hands; and I go to speak his name but before I can, he kisses me.