The Woman In the Mirror Read online

  The doctor encourages me to turn back; he’ll be up with the dog soon enough. But I’m looking at that bell box, picturing the maids rushing up to the captain’s bedside. I’m picturing the woman in bed beside him.

  ‘Did his wife die while he was away?’ The darkness makes me bold. Here we cannot be heard, cannot be seen. Here, I can say what I like.

  Henry shakes his head. ‘The captain’s crash happened in ’41. He was no good to the effort after that and came straight back to Winterbourne. She’d struggled while he was absent, of course, coping with two babies on her own. But it wasn’t until the following year that she died.’ There, he stops. He knows we have stumbled off limits.

  ‘I don’t mean to speak out of turn,’ I say, hoping to assure him of my loyalty. ‘It’s just I feel such affiliation with Edmund and Constance, and in turn with Winterbourne, and in turn with the captain. I care for them all.’

  ‘I understand. But the death of Laura de Grey isn’t a matter for discussion, here or anywhere in Polcreath. I should never have entertained it.’

  Her name coats me like heat. It’s the first time I have heard it. Laura.

  I have an almost overwhelming desire to say it aloud, but I don’t. Her husband would have left to fight right after their twins were born, leaving her to deal with their infancy by herself. I recall Mrs Yarrow talking about the evacuees and the bell box, about those howling hounds belonging to the man called Marlin, and how Laura was kept awake at night, exhausted and alone, prey to two screaming nurslings, growing to hate Winterbourne and its severe outlook, its arched windows and gloom-laden passages, the thrashing sea outside mirroring the thrashing in her mind, wishing fervently for her husband’s return… And when the captain did come back, had he been the same? Physically he was compromised, yes, but was he the man she’d married, in spirit, in soul, in temperament? Did he look at her in the same way; did he talk to her as he had? Laura. The mother. The wife. The powerful.

  Laura.

  ‘I shouldn’t have raised it,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

  We are interrupted by a frantic bark. ‘At last!’ the doctor mutters, and I follow him down the hall and towards another set of descending steps. Just how deep does Winterbourne go? ‘I should have known he’d be here,’ says Henry, as the barking becomes a higher pitched yap, a moan, nearly, as if Tipper has hurt himself. ‘The cellar – again!’ We arrive in a small, damp room: the full stop of the house. It can’t be longer than a few metres, and the walls are exposed stone, mottled black. There are a few empty crates on their sides on the dusty ground.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  Henry grabs the dog’s collar and attempts to soothe him, but the animal is wild. I take a step back: Tipper’s eyes are mad, his mouth pulled over his gums, his teeth bared. Saliva darts from his tongue with each expulsion. His fur stands on end, his spine arched, his tail set. He yelps then cowers, yelps then cowers.

  ‘Come now, boy,’ says the doctor gently, ‘it’s just a silly old door.’

  I see the door he means, though I didn’t at first. It is set in the corner, lost in shadow but not quite. It is unfeasibly old-looking, and small, so small as to be uncertain if it was intended for a person to walk or crawl through. Its wood is cracked and splintered with age. In the style of the house, it wears a gothic arch, with a heavy rounded handle partway down. I try the handle but it doesn’t give.

  ‘Why is he afraid?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s an old dog full of bad habits,’ says the doctor lightly, although I can see he’s as keen to get back upstairs as I am.

  ‘Where does it lead?’

  Henry doesn’t know. ‘I should think there’s a lot of old rubbish behind there,’ he says. ‘Tipper can smell it.’ He’s struggling to restrain the dog. ‘Let’s go.’

  We head back the way we’ve come, Tipper dipping his head, his tail bowed, staying tight to his master’s heel. ‘That’s the last time I bring you with me, do you hear?’ he says gently to the hound. Before we ascend the final staircase, I look behind, wondering at this cold, abandoned netherworld, seeing that strange door, beyond which Tipper knew about something we did not.

  I hear her name again.

  Laura.

  Chapter 11

  I sleep well that night. When I wake at the usual time, I imagine for a moment that it is still the small hours, for my room is drenched in a sooty, dim light.

  Climbing out of bed, I pull the curtains and see why. The mists have rolled in. I can scarcely see a foot from the window, the air obscured with dense, swirling fog. The sea has vanished, the sky invisible. I glimpse the position of Winterbourne in my mind’s eye, high on the Landogger Bluff, closeted in vapour; cold mists press against the walls and turrets, drifting beneath the arches, smothering the roof of the chapel…

  All is quiet. All is still.

  As ever when I go to tie back the drapes, I am faced with that eerie painting. Each day, I like it less. Something prevents me from taking it down, some sense that it has been here longer than I. Today, I try not to examine it, focusing instead on the silk knots that draw the curtains into place. And yet I cannot resist. The girl at the window lures me, as determinedly and insidiously as the fogs that roll in off the sea, creeping overnight, slowly, stealthily; it is as if she is whispering to me: Look, look… Is it my fancy, or has her gaze changed? Her regard has moved to one side, towards me, towards the ancient, indecipherable sea. I could swear that yesterday it was not so.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Alice, I tell myself. The print is honestly so small, and the girl within it even smaller, that to pick out such an unlikely discrepancy is absurd.

  At Burstead, my lover and I once spent a night together in the music school. I remember those handsome, silent pianos, dozens of them, and the way they shone in the moonlight, like war heroes at a gathering, mute but magnificent. I kept thinking, then, that I heard noises in the dark, people who had found us as we lay in Practice Room 3, or some noise beyond, a flit of wings, a whisper, some flight of my nervous disposition. ‘There’s nothing,’ he said to me, as he turned to kiss me in the purple light. ‘There’s no one here except you and me…’ I try to hear him now, but his voice grows fainter with every passing year. There’s no one here. Just me.

  I obscure the painting as far as is possible with the material and go to my dressing room, slipping off my nightdress and laying it on the bed. It’s only when I’m buttoning my skirt that I notice the smudge on the inside of my elbow, where the skin creases and softens in the bend of my arm. Thinking it must be soot from the fire, I try to wipe it away and when it doesn’t come, I lick my thumb and try again. Pressing harder this time, it smarts. It’s a bruise, clearly: bluish-brown and shaped like an almond. It seems an odd place to have it, not the sort of bump one might acquire from walking into a bedframe or knocking one’s arm on the newel post.

  Surely I struck it in a game with the children. I’ve been so occupied with those happy souls since arriving at Winterbourne that I can’t promise I’d even have noticed. Filled with pleasure at the thought of seeing them at breakfast, I finish dressing and go downstairs to greet my wards.

  *

  ‘Be careful, miss,’ says Tom as he helps us into our coats and boots. ‘The captain doesn’t like the children to go out when the mists are in. It’s awful cold and damp.’

  ‘We’ll be fine, Tom. Fresh air is good for the children – and, besides, we’ve already sought the captain’s permission.’ This is only true in part. I would have sooner received consent directly, but when I tapped on de Grey’s study door an hour previously, asking if we might venture out for a walk, I was met only by silence.

  Instead it fell to the boy Edmund to reassure me that his father had given approval. ‘It’s quite all right, Alice,’ Edmund told me with confidence. ‘I met Father in the drawing room and he agreed we could go. He trusts you, Alice,’ he said, his eyes sparkling, ‘he knows you’ll take care of us.’ I flushed at the unexpected compliment. Could the captain have for
med a positive opinion of me so fast, and in such an obvious way that it would be clear to the children?

  ‘Take this,’ says Tom, producing an old dog whistle and looping it round my neck. ‘Like I said, you’ll fast lose your bearings.’

  ‘We’re not going far.’

  ‘I’m excited!’ Constance is pulling on her mittens. Next to her, Edmund yanks his cap down over his ears. ‘We’re going on an adventure,’ he says.

  I smile at Tom in a way I hope reassures him that we are doing no such thing. But Tom doesn’t look reassured.

  ‘Take the whistle,’ he says, ‘and watch your step.’

  Minutes later, the door closes behind us. I cannot wait to get out on the moors. The world seems changed, magical and deeply peaceful, as if we might slip into it unheeded, like woods on a snowy morning awaiting a first footprint.

  ‘Can you hear the sea?’ Constance cries. ‘I can hear it – but I can’t see it!’

  She’s right. It’s an odd impression because we are so close to the cliff drop and yet we cannot detect a thing. The sea crashes in with a deep, mellow roar, which takes on a new personality in this muffled, sunken world. Without bearings to situate us – a few steps from the house and it disappears completely – our senses are primed elsewhere. The tide bellows louder; the cold snap in the air smells startlingly clean.

  ‘Hold my hands, children.’

  ‘Look at our boots!’ Edmund exclaims as we walk, emerging in pockets of better vision that enable me to reclaim our situation, before we are engulfed once more. Our boots do indeed look strange, uncannily real as they plod ahead, three pairs in a line, two small, one big, and bizarrely separate from the rest of us. It is as if we are walking on clouds, and for a moment the ground beneath us feels precarious, as if we could fall through it at any moment.

  I stop. The fog is closing in, too close. I cannot breathe.

  ‘What’s the matter, Alice?’ Constance asks.

  ‘Nothing, I—’ My lungs strain. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Listen for the lighthouse,’ says Edmund, in a voice that sounds much older than his own. ‘That’s how you can tell where you are.’

  ‘Do you often come out in the mists?’ I ask, with a nervous laugh. Edmund doesn’t reply. I listen for the Polcreath tower, and its sharp fog blasts tell me we are over the westernmost brow and close to the sea. But in the next instant, I wonder that I don’t hear it to my other side, or above, or behind. The blasts grow louder and more aggressive. My knees weaken. I’m back in London, on a cold March night during the Blitz, and the air-raid sirens are wailing, louder and louder, louder and louder…

  ‘Bombs away!’

  Edmund releases my hand and runs into the wall of fog. I turn, turn, turn, gripping Constance tightly, but I cannot see a thing. I cannot see him.

  ‘Edmund!’

  I think I hear him whooping in the distance, then it is only the ravens’ caws I can hear, and if I can’t see a metre in front of me then how can he? How can he see the cliff edge, the churning swell of the sea, the dagger-sharp rocks below?

  ‘Edmund! Come back here now!’

  But how will he know where we are? How will he see me?

  ‘EDMUND!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Alice,’ says Constance, her little-girl voice light and singsong. ‘He’ll be all right. He knows Winterbourne better than you, remember.’

  All at once the very sound of Constance, my sweet, sweet Constance, turns on me. I cannot see the child’s face, only the pale grip of her small hand in mine, and our joined palms appear ghostly, dismembered, horrifying. All at once I remember that other hand, her hand, years ago, in the water, reaching for mine, and for a shocking instant it could be hers, her clammy grip, rigid with fear, threatening to drag me in!

  ‘We both know Winterbourne better than you.’

  Why does she talk to me in that tone?

  ‘EDMUND!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Alice. You are being silly now.’

  I release her hand, drawing mine sharply away as if something black and slippery has crawled over it. Constance starts crying.

  ‘Oh, my Constance!’ I kneel to her, find her face with my hands and embrace her. Suddenly she is my Constance again, the strangeness dissolved. She is but a child! ‘I’m sorry, my darling. I’m worried for your brother – that is all. We must find him. Do you know where he is? Do you know where he might have run to?’

  The girl sniffs. She wipes her eyes. Her features soften and morph in the eerie half-light, and for a second she looks canny, before her innocence resumes.

  ‘What are you looking at, child?’ For Constance’s gaze is trained over my shoulder. I turn but see nothing. ‘What are you looking at?’

  And then I see her. The mist spools patiently across the cliffs and in one glimmer of clarity I see her. There is a woman. She is facing the sea. She wears all black, head to toe, like a widow. I squint, trying to draw her more sharply into focus, but the more I look, the more she escapes my definition. She flickers and fades, in moments as real as day and in the next a mere black shape, impossibly still and impossibly menacing. What is she doing there? She is right on the bluff; she must be mere inches from its edge. Who is she? ‘Hello?’ I call. ‘Is somebody there?’

  Constance has my hand again, and her thumb tickles mine for an instant, as if she is stroking it, as if she is the one replying, Yes, somebody is. The vision itself does not reply. The woman does not move. I have the blinding, improbable notion that she has taken Edmund, stolen him and flung him over the edge into the roiling swell…

  She’s come back for you, Alice.

  You always knew she would.

  I cannot bear for Constance to witness her. Whirling back on the girl, I capture her in my cloak, shutting out our dark companion.

  ‘Alice, Alice, I can’t see a thing!’

  I crouch to her, my eyes wild. ‘I don’t want you to see, my darling.’

  ‘Why?’ She snivels, wipes her nose, at once a little girl again, my harmless child. ‘I’m scared, Alice – you’re scaring me!’

  I turn my head to the cliff edge but the woman has disappeared.

  ‘She’s gone,’ I say, searching left and right. ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘Who?’ Constance is crying again now, gripping my cloak with one hand but seeming to pull away at the same time, as if she can’t be sure where the danger lies. But I know where it lies. It lies with that spectre, which, now vanished, seems all the more looming for its absence. There is nowhere the woman can have gone. The mist churns silently across the landscape, exposing the hill as it goes. If she had moved off, I would have caught her by now. She is nowhere. Not unless…

  Beneath us, out of sight, the tide rolls on, a thunderous crash of waves.

  ‘Didn’t you see her?’ I shiver, pulling the girl close. ‘She was right there!’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

  I crouch to her again and search her face. I want to tell Constance that I saw her looking, I saw her, before I turned to the phantom myself – but the words dry on my tongue. Constance’s lip is trembling, her eyes wet with tears. Am I mistaken?

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I manage, and pull her towards me. I must get a hold on myself. This sweet girl is my charge. Her arms wrap round me and her hair is fragrant gold: once again she is my angel, and we neither of us saw the devil on the cliff.

  As we pull apart, her hands cross over my elbow. I feel pressure on the bruise inside my arm, as if her tiny fingers have pressed it.

  I stand and call his name. Nothing. The whistle blows, short and shrill.

  *

  Tom is with us quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammer, ‘he ran off. Edmund ran off. Didn’t he, Constance, darling? He just let go. I don’t know where he is. Oh, help us, Tom!’

  The houseman looks to Constance, who neither supports nor denies my claims. ‘It’s all right,’ he puts a hand on my shoulder, ‘we’ll find him.’ He steers me over the hill and then I see the house emerge from th
e fog – it must be clearing now, daylight beginning to break through – far closer than I had expected.

  ‘Go back indoors,’ he says, ‘and wait for us there.’

  We obey. My fingers and toes are numb with cold, or fear. Mrs Yarrow meets us and gives us mugs of warmed milk, but I can’t drink mine while I’m thinking of Edmund out in the wild, frozen and alone. I feel disgraced by my idiotic confidence, stalking out into the savage mist as if it posed no threat whatsoever. I feel dismayed by my failure to speak to the captain in person about our endeavour, and the vanity that had coaxed me into it, enjoying the captain’s trust in me and wanting to see that trust rewarded. ‘Mrs Yarrow,’ I splutter, once Constance is safely by the fire and out of earshot. ‘Were you out there just now? Were you out in the fog?’

  ‘Certainly not, miss!’

  ‘I saw a woman. She was standing on the cliff.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Perfectly. She was… Oh, she was horrible!’

  ‘The fog plays tricks on us, miss,’ says the cook. ‘There’d be nobody foolish enough to go walking alone on a morning like this.’

  ‘I swear I saw her. Constance did, too, but she won’t admit it.’

  Mrs Yarrow washes out the milk pan. ‘Constance saw her?’

  ‘Yes. I might not have noticed this fiend were it not for her.’

  The cook puts the pan on the draining board to dry. ‘This was after Edmund ran away from you?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Children like to play games.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Especially with a new prospect such as yourself, miss.’

  ‘Please be frank, Mrs Yarrow.’

  The cook appears undecided as to whether to speak further. She peers past me to check the hallway is clear, before: ‘Ever since I can recall,’ she says, ‘those twins have had a mischief to them. Goodness knows I struggled to cope with them on my own, before you arrived. Always playing pranks on me, they were. Hiding my belongings. Tricking me into believing I’d said words I hadn’t. Knocking on my door late at night and then running away, so that I became convinced of some ghoul! Once, the boy even put a nasty big spider in my bed, and when I pulled back the covers I screamed the house down – and I knew it was him, I knew!’