The Woman in the Mirror: Read online

  ‘Very well, Miss Miller,’ he says. ‘My client entrusts me with the authority to hire at will in light of my appraisal of an applicant’s suitability, and I am pleased to offer you the position of governess at the Polcreath estate with immediate effect.’

  I rein in my delight. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Before you accept, is there anything you would like to ask us?’

  ‘Your client’s name, and the name of the house.’

  ‘Then I must insist on your signature.’

  He slides a piece of paper across the desk, a contract of sorts, listing my start date as this coming week, the broad terms of my responsibilities towards the children, and that my bed and board will be provided. There is a dotted line at the foot, awaiting my pen. ‘I understand it is unorthodox,’ he says, ‘but my client is a private man. We need assurance of your allegiance before I’m permitted to give details.’

  ‘But until I have details I have little idea what I am signing.’

  The man holds his hands up, as if helpless. I wait a moment, but there is never any hesitation in my mind. I collect the pen and sign my name.

  Chapter 2

  My train pulls into Polcreath Station at four o’clock on Sunday. The warmth has gone out of the day and a rich, autumn sun sits low on the horizon, casting the land in a burned harvest glow. I’m quick to see the car, but then it’s hard to miss, a smart, black Rolls-Royce whose white wheels gleam like bones in the fading light.

  A man greets me, short, middle-aged, fair. ‘Miss Miller?’

  ‘How do you do.’

  He lifts my bags into the car then opens the rear door for me. Up close, the Rolls is more decayed than it first appeared. Its paintwork is peeling and inside the upholstery is fissured and coming away from the seat frames. There is the smell of old cigarettes and petrol. It takes the chauffeur a moment to start the engine.

  ‘I’m Tom, Winterbourne’s houseman,’ he says, when I ask him: not a chauffeur after all, then. ‘I’ll turn my hand to anything.’ He has a gentle Northern accent and a friendly, easy manner. ‘There’s not many of us – just me and Cook. And you, now, of course. The house can’t afford anyone else, though goodness knows we need it. We’re mighty excited to have you joining us, miss. Winterbourne always seems darker at this time of year, when the evenings draw in and the light starts to go. The more company the better, I say.’

  ‘Please, call me Alice.’

  ‘Right you are, miss.’

  I smile. ‘Is it far to Winterbourne?’

  ‘Not far. Over the bluff. The sea makes it seem further – there’s a lot of sea. Are you used to the sea, miss?’

  ‘Not very. One or two holidays as a child.’

  ‘The sea’s as much a part of Winterbourne as its roof and walls. I expect that sounds daft to a city lady like yourself, but there it is. You can see the sea from every window, did they tell you that?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me much about anything.’

  Tom crunches the gears. ‘This car’s a bad lot. The captain would never part with it, but really we’d be better off with a horse and cart, at the rate this thing goes.’

  ‘More comfortable, though, I’d wager.’ Although I’m being generous: with every bump and rut in the road the car squeaks in protest, and the springs in my seat dig painfully into my thighs. The short distance Tom promised is ever lengthening. In time we come off the road and on to a track, on either side of which the countryside spreads, a swathe of dark green that eventually gives way, if I squint into the distance, to a flat sheet of grey water.

  ‘The moors look tame from here,’ says Tom, with a quick glance over his shoulder, ‘but wait till we reach the cliffs. It’s a sheer drop there – ground beneath your feet one moment, then nothing. You’ve got to be careful, miss. The mists that come in off the sea are solid. Some days you can’t see more than a foot or two in front, you can’t see a thing. All you’ve got to go on is the sound of the sea, but if you lose your bearings with that, one wrong step and you’re gone. Winterbourne’s right on the bluff. Some people say it’s the second lighthouse at Polcreath.’

  ‘How long have you worked for the captain?’

  ‘Since before the war. I knew him when he was a…different sort of person. The war changed people, didn’t it? Just because you have a title, or a place like Winterbourne, it doesn’t spare you. He was hurt in France; it’s been hard for him, an able-bodied man like that suddenly made a cripple. Did the war change you, miss?’

  I focus on the horizon, an expanse of steel coming ever closer, and concentrate on the clean line of it so intently that I can’t think of anything else. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Between you and me, I could likely find better-paid employment elsewhere, but I’ve got loyalty for Winterbourne, and for the captain. My mother used to say that you’re nothing without your friends. The captain would never say I was a friend, but he doesn’t say a lot of things that he might really mean.’

  ‘How tragic that he lost his wife.’

  ‘Indeed, miss.’ There’s a laden silence. ‘But we don’t speak about that.’

  I sit back. I had hoped that Tom’s loquaciousness might lend itself to a confidence, but seemingly not on this matter. Two people now have refused to speak to me about the former woman of the house. What happened to her?

  I am expecting us to come across the Hall suddenly, to catch a quick glimpse of it between trees or to swing abruptly through the park gates, but instead I spot it first as a ragged smudge on the hill. That’s how it appears – as an inkblot the size of my thumb, spilled in water, its edges seeming to fall away or dissolve into air. There is something about its position, elevated and alone, that reminds me of a fortress in a storybook, or of a drawing of a haunted house, its black silhouette set starkly against the deepening orange of the sky. As we approach, I begin to make out its features. To say that Winterbourne is an extreme-looking house would be an understatement.

  It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic façade. The place instantly brings to mind an imposing religious house – a Parisian cathedral, perhaps, decorated with gaping arches and delicate spires. Turrets thrust skyward, and to the east the blunt teeth of a battlement crown remind me of a game of chess. Plunging gargoyles are laced around its many necks, long and thin, jutting, as if leaping from the building’s skin. Lancet windows, too many to count, adorn the exterior, and set on the western front is what appears to be a chapel. I was scarcely aware of having entered the park, and it strikes me that we must have crossed into it a while ago; that the land we’ve been driving on all this time belongs to Winterbourne.

  Gnarled trees creep out of the drowning afternoon. To our left, away from the sea, spreads a wild, dark wood, dense with firs and the soft black mystery of how it feels to be lost, away from home, when you are a child and the night draws close. On the other, the sea is a wide-eyed stare, lighter and smoother now we are near, like pearls held in a cold hand. I see what Tom meant about the drop from the cliffs: the land sweeps up and away from the hall, a brief sharp lip like the crest of a wave, and then it is a four-hundred-foot plummet to the rocks. Further still into that unblinking spread I detect Polcreath Point, the tower light, a mile or so from the shore.

  ‘Here we are, miss.’ Tom turns the Rolls a final time and we embark up the final stretch towards the house, a narrow track between overgrown topiary. Leafy fingers drag against the windows, and the car rocks over a series of potholes that propels my vanity case into the foothold. At last we emerge into an oval of gravel, at the centre of which is an unkempt planter, tangled with weeds.

  ‘Winterbourne Hall.’

  I gaze up at my new lodgings, and imagine how my arrival must look. A throbbing engine, a lonely car – and a woman, peering skyward, her hand poised to open the door, and some slight switch of nameless apprehension that makes her pause.

  *

  The first thing I notice is the smell. It isn’t unpleasant, merely unusual, a liturgical smell like the inside of a church: woo
d, stone and burning candles.

  There are no candles burning. The entrance is gloomy, lit by a flickering candelabrum. ‘Ticky generator,’ explains Tom, taking off his cap. ‘We use fires, mostly.’ I look up at the chandelier, its bulbs bruised with dust and casting an uncertain glow that sends tapered shadows across the walls. The ceiling is ribbed and vaulted, like the roof of a basilica, but its decorations are bleached and crumbled. A staircase climbs ahead of me, a faded scarlet runner up its centre, bolted in place by gold pins. Some of the pins are missing and the carpet frays up against the wood like a rabbit’s tail. On the upper walls, a trio of hangings in red and bronze sits alongside twisting metal sconces, better suited to a Transylvanian castle than to a declining Cornish home. There is a large stone fireplace, coated in soot, and several items of heavy Elizabethan furniture positioned in alcoves: elaborate dark-wood chairs, an occasional table, and a hulking chest with edges wreathed in nail heads.

  On the landing above, I see closed doors, set with gothic forging. The windows are heavily draped in velvet, with tasselled tiebacks. Dozens of eyes watch me watching. Paintings of the captain’s ancestors bear down from every facet.

  For a moment I have the uncanny sense of having been here before – then I place the connection. The headmaster’s study at Burstead. How, when a girl was called in for a flogging, she would be surrounded by an army of onlookers – those men, tyrants past, with their shining eyes and satisfied smirks, their portraits as immovable as the headmaster’s intention, and she would stand in the red punitive glow of the stained-glass window and bite her lip while the first lash came…

  Afterwards, when they couldn’t decide how the tragedy had happened, they brought us all in for a whipping; perhaps they thought the belt would draw it out of us as cleanly as it drew blood to the skin. The difficulty was that nobody except me knew the truth. Nobody else had been there. They sensed a secret, dark and dreadful, rippling through the dormitories like an electrical charge, but I was the only girl who knew and I wasn’t about to share it. So I kept my lips shut and I let the lashes come for me and for the others, and time passed and term ended and school finished not long after that.

  I blink, and take my gloves off.

  ‘Where are the children?’ I ask. ‘I should like to introduce myself.’

  Tom gives me a strange look. ‘The captain asked us to settle you in first, miss. The twins can get overexcited. They like to play games.’

  ‘Well, they’re children, aren’t they?’

  He pauses, as if my query might have some other answer.

  ‘What happened to their previous governess? The woman before me?’

  ‘She left,’ Tom replies, too quickly and smoothly for it to be the truth. ‘One morning, suddenly. We had no warning, miss, honestly. She sent word days later – a family emergency. She was mighty sad about it, hated letting the captain down. We all of us hate to let the captain down. It’d be horrible if he was let down again, wouldn’t it, miss? After the effort he’s gone to, to bring you down here. There’s only so much a man can take. The captain said there was no way round it, and the world exists outside Winterbourne whether we like it or not. Because you do feel that way, miss, here, after a while. Like Winterbourne is all there is, just the house and sea. You find you don’t need anything else.’ His expression is unfathomable, doggedly loyal.

  ‘Do the children miss her terribly?’ I am not sure if I am talking about the governess or the children’s mother: this pair of doomed women, for a moment, seem bound in a fundamental, terrifying way, but the thought flits free before I can catch it.

  ‘Of course they do,’ Tom says. ‘But they’ll warm to you even better.’

  I’m about to ask my predecessor’s name – it seems important to know it – when there is a noise on the staircase: a shuffle of footsteps, a slow, lilting gait, punctuated by the unmistakable point of a cane. When my employer comes into view, I take a step back. I have never seen anyone in my life who looks like this.

  ‘The new governess,’ he says bluntly, twisting his cane into the stair.

  For a moment I forget my name.

  ‘Alice Miller,’ I say at last.

  The man steps forward, into a pit of shadow so that I can no longer see his face. Captain Jonathan de Grey. The name that has followed me from London, from that interview that seems like years ago in spite of it being days – from before then, even, if that were possible. ‘I trust you had a good journey,’ he says, in a peculiar, remote voice. ‘We’re very pleased that you’re here. Very pleased indeed.’

  Chapter 3

  New York, present day

  Rachel Wright stepped on to the podium to address her guests. Pride filled her as she took in the gallery launch, the people mingling, the inspiring artworks and the sheer transformation of the space she had purchased six months ago from rundown warehouse to edgy exhibition. Immediately, she felt his eyes on her.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Paul, her assistant, announced as he tapped the microphone. ‘May I introduce the woman responsible for tonight: Founder and Director of the Square Peg Gallery – Rachel Wright!’ Paul smiled as he led the applause. He wanted to please her. Everyone did. Rachel commanded respect. Little was known about her private life and the care with which she protected it was a point of staunch admiration. Paul and the others knew about the big thing, of course. But nobody mentioned it.

  ‘Thank you all for being here tonight,’ Rachel began. ‘And thanks especially to our sponsors, without whom none of this would be possible – in particular White Label Inc. and G&V Assets.’ She deliberately named his firm second; it was a stupid power thing. More applause, for them or for her, it didn’t matter. She needed their funds and they needed her association. She’d said as much in her pitch. Where was their commitment to community culture? Were their rivals delivering on social responsibility? She remembered launching her petition in his boardroom, the way his black eyes had trained into her as they trained into her now, challenging her. How did he always manage it? Rachel could present to sponsors from here to Milan, could sit opposite the greatest creatives in the world, but with him, well, he made her feel the spotlight. It was the excitement of their arrangement, she supposed.

  ‘If this gallery hasn’t stopped to breathe, then neither have I,’ Rachel told her audience, thinking of the three hours’ sleep she had grown accustomed to snatching; of the caffeine she lived off and the cigarettes she was trying to give up but that sometimes pushed her that extra hour into the night, of the determination – ‘my mother had another word for it,’ she joked – that took an idea out of one’s head and made it a reality; of the team she’d had behind her; of her Upper West Side apartment that she never spent any time in and that had become overtaken by work. Talking about the gallery was like talking about herself, for she had given everything to it over the past eighteen months. Art was her passion and her purpose. She had always found sanctuary in it, in its possibility and lack of boundary, in its subjectivity and beauty, in its strength to innovate and energise, to change minds and start dialogues. Since she could remember, she’d been happiest staring into a painting or admiring a sculpture, imagining the stories that went into it and, in doing so, she was able to forget her own.

  As always when Rachel spoke in front of big crowds, she wound up feeling they were waiting for more. Perhaps they were. They knew, after all, what had happened to her back in 2012. It had been in the papers, talked about over breakfast tables. Did they expect her to reference it? She wondered, sometimes, if she should. That maybe if she mentioned it once, that would be enough. That would sate their curiosity about whether it was an event she acknowledged and accepted, an event she had dealt with. Perhaps she didn’t ever bring it up because she hadn’t dealt with it.

  Her speech closed to the sound of rapturous appreciation. Rachel dared herself to find his face. It wasn’t difficult. She could just imagine the scent of his aftershave, which she caught when they embraced, just inside the angle of his shirt c
ollar.

  *

  Of course he followed her back from the launch. Mutually they had decided not to be seen together in public. On the surface neither wanted their position to be compromised – his investment muddied the waters somewhat – but deep down it was their shared reluctance to commit. A no-strings arrangement suited both fine. Secret liaisons at her apartment or his heightened the thrill. Being linked officially made it too serious, too much of a fact. Rachel wasn’t ready for that. She liked the emotional distance.

  She was stepping into the shower when she heard the buzzer go.

  ‘Aaron.’ She answered the door in her gown. ‘It’s two a.m. Can’t you sleep?’

  He grinned. ‘Not without you.’ He leaned in and she turned her face away, just a fraction, to tease him, even though she knew she would let herself be kissed.

  ‘You were sensational tonight,’ he said, his arms looping round her waist.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I mean it. I was impressed.’

  She could never tell how sincere he was being. Aaron Grewal was arrogant and proud (as she suspected were many multimillionaires), and she had a reasonable inkling he slept with other women. But she didn’t care. This wasn’t about heart and soul; it was about danger and distraction. Aaron was different to what she was used to…to what was missing. He was like her late nights, her coffee, her deadlines, a quick fix to get through, nothing permanent or serious, nothing it would hurt to lose.

  Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms. It was nice to be held, to hear the warm beat of another person’s heart. When she’d won the pitch from Aaron’s firm, they’d told her she was one of the strongest candidates they’d seen. The word had stayed with her, become part of why she’d been drawn into romance with Aaron in the first place. He saw her strength and recognised it. Strength was the reason she was still here. It was how she’d got ahead, being decisive, being convinced: it was how she’d survived.