Chapter Seventeen
Chapter
Seventeen
“How can that be?” Marina asks me, wide-eyed when I relay all of this to them in the library a little later.
Artie is agog, although I’m not sure if it’s because of Leo’s lovesick stigmata-like episode or the fact that he’s eating one of a batch of Hells Bells’s homemade custard creams. They’re similar in taste to the shop-bought version, only a million times nicer and about ten times the size.
They look like they’d be the perfect bricks to build an edible house from.
I daren’t let my mind wander too far down this particular road while I’m at work, because it’s one of my ultimate top-ten fantasies.
I regularly construct houses made entirely of confectionary in my head, and then I’m visited in my sugar palace by one of any number of superheroes.
We mostly spend our time alternating between shagging like chocolate Easter bunnies and licking the sherbet-coated walls.
It’s pretty much perfect in every way, right down to the sweet cigarettes we smoke afterward while lying on our bed made of marshmallows and gazing at the stars.
We have a damn fine view of them too, because we’ve eaten the roof.
“It’s very rare,” I say, dragging myself out of my sugar shack and back to the moment.
“Practically unheard of, to be honest. It only happens when there’s an intense emotional connection between the living and the dead.
” My mother will be poring over her reference books when I tell her about this, she’s a fan of unusual astral phenomena.
So few people can actually see ghosts in the first place, let alone fall in love with them.
Marina frowns. “Is that why your gran can still get it on with your grandpa Duke even though he’s been dead for decades?”
“Thanks for that.” I shudder at the idea, but she’s kind of right.
My grandpa’s ghost is happily tethered to their marital bed for Gran to enjoy whenever the mood strikes.
She might be well past retirement age, but between Grandpa Duke and her daily observance of yoga, she’s probably the fittest Bittersweet in Chapelwick.
“So could he feel her flesh when he reached out?”
“He said not,” I say, although privately I’m not sure I believe him.
He went to pieces when she’d gone, even though he’ll no doubt see her looking every bit alive and well and up to high jinks again soon enough.
I knew he’d fallen hard and fast for her, but the fact that they connected so intimately has to mean that the feelings aren’t all one-sided.
That’s potentially a huge, momentous wrench in the works as far as getting rid of her is concerned.
Bloody Leo. Marina was right earlier. He’d be better off out of the way, because all he’s going to do is lose his grip. And his heart, by all accounts.
Fabulous. Just as we were beginning to achieve a professional friendship of sorts, he goes and falls in love with a phantom trapeze artist and leaves me with the messy job of heartbreaker as well as ghost buster. This job just keeps on getting harder and harder.
I cave in and shove a custard cream into my mouth sideways.
“Cross your fingers,” I breathe. We’ve trooped up to the top of the castle and I’m hoping like hell that the key I unearthed in the garden fits the turret door. Artie holds up both hands to show me his tightly crossed fingers and Marina gives me an encouraging nod, so I push the key into the lock.
“It fits,” I whisper, feeling the notches on the old key slide into place. It turns with a good twist, and for the first time in years, the turret door swings open on its hinges.
“It’s a good job I haven’t got claustrophobia,” Marina says, right behind me as we pick our way up the narrow, winding stone steps. There’s another door at the top, thankfully not locked, and I step cautiously inside the room and pause as Marina comes to stand beside me.
“Wow,” she whispers, and I can only agree.
Shafts of bright sunlight slant in through the leaded window, warming and illuminating the quiet, circular room. Mellow boards cover the floor, and costumes, a dozen or more, line the walls. Dazzling showgirl leotards and tutus, Britannia’s, no doubt.
Silk ballerina slippers hang with each one, tied by their ribbons to the padded hangers.
We walk slowly around the room gazing at them; I can well imagine how captivating Britannia would have looked in them to her rapt audience below.
There’s just one piece of furniture in the room: a wooden blanket box beneath the window, and I come to rest in front of it.
“That’s some view.” I follow Marina’s gaze out of the window; it’s a clear summer’s day and you can see for uninterrupted mile on mile. “No wonder she loved it up here.”
I think it was more than the view that attracted Britannia to the tower. I’ve seen her perform, soaring like a bird, and up here was probably the closest she could get to being skyborne and free. I bend, and as I’d hoped, the lid to the blanket box isn’t locked.
It’s full. Full of memories—programs and circus memorabilia, scraps of a lifetime spent moving from town to town.
A child’s ballerina pumps, a battered picture book, a well-loved doll dressed in a tattered scarlet coat.
It speaks of a normal little girl living an extraordinary life.
I cannot help but see how it is almost the opposite of my own life as a different child striving to fit into a normal world.
A photograph catches my eye; a woman, formally staged and dressed, but charismatic nonetheless.
Was this Lady Eleanor’s sister? Britannia’s mother?
I think she must have been; there is a shared devil-may-care look in her eyes that jumps out even from the black-and-white image in my hands.
“This must have been her mum.”
In my mind’s eye it’s easy to imagine Britannia as a spirited child, wild-haired and innocent, clutching her mum’s hand.
God, I hope she had a happy childhood, because what I know of her all-too-brief adult life tells me that she was deeply unhappy.
I sigh, heavyhearted, as I hand the picture to Marina.
“She was beautiful. Are they very alike?”
I nod, looking at the image. “Britannia has darker hair, but yes.” The woman in the photo is about the same age as Britannia must have been when she died, and there is the hint of a smile playing over her mouth even though she is trying to be serious for the camera.
A small linen-wrapped parcel lies at the bottom of the chest and I lift it carefully out onto the floor. It’s feather light and I fold the cloth back to reveal something small made from delicate ivory silk. Unfolding it on its linen wrapper for protection, I sigh.
“Do you think it’s a memento from when she was a baby?” Marina asks quietly.
I study the tiny romper and try to imagine an infant Britannia. I wonder if her mum rocked her to sleep at night and told her stories as my mother did with me. I hope so.
“I don’t know,” I murmur. “It doesn’t look as if it’s ever been worn, does it?”
Marina considers it before she’s distracted by the bleep of her phone inside her bra. Pulling it out unceremoniously, she clicks the screen.
“Artie wants to know where we are. He says he’s looking for us in the garden.”
She stands and peers out of the window. “He’s down there…” She squints. “With Fletcher Gunn.” She takes photos of the blanket box contents for our case file before I gently rewrap the linen around the baby romper and pack Britannia’s belongings carefully away as I found them.
I hang up the phone. I don’t know what possessed me to make the call; I should have at least consulted my Magic 8 Ball beforehand.
One by one, everyone has left me, scattering like a dandelion clock on a sudden five o’clock breeze.
Marina offered to stay with me, even though I know it would be a complete pain in the ass for her mum to arrange for someone else to sit with her grandpa.
Artie valiantly offered too, even though we all know that his mother will have a heart attack if he hasn’t walked through the garden gate for his dinner by six.
I turned them both down, of course, and shooed them out.
Leo and the twins speedily retired to their chambers to do whatever they do over there.
I imagine that Nikki and Vikki probably need to plug themselves into the mains and, given Leo’s behavior, it’s highly likely that he’s hoping for a visit from a frisky, gorgeous but inconveniently dead circus queen.
The staff have clocked off and Lois and Barty didn’t stay much past lunchtime, because organizing a shindig the size of theirs at short notice clearly requires lots of swanning around the county to discuss canapés and visiting dressmakers.
And that’s more or less how I found myself home alone in a seventeen-bedroom castle, impulsively on the phone inviting my mother and my grandmother over for a spot of dinner.
I think I’ve been overcome with delusions of grandeur, as if I’m chatelaine of the castle and am bestowing an invite upon the lowly surfs of Chapelwick to come feast at my dinner table and gaze upon the bounty of my wealth.
That, or I’m so hellishly lonely that I need to invite my family over or else eat my dinner on my knees with only Lestat for company.
And the ghosts, of course, but they don’t really count.
I’m quietly hoping that my mother or Gran might be able to help me crack the case open a little.
It’s like a tight little nut refusing to yield, and with only days to go to the deadline, I’m badly in need of a breakthrough.
Yes. There are many good reasons to invite my folks over, and none of them are even remotely to mask my gnawing disappointment about Fletcher Gunn running out on me.