3
Cecilia
WHEN CECILIA WAS FOUR, maybe five – the memory is unrooted in that way of early life – Leo would laugh at how she said her own name.
Too many sibilants, the vowels all tight and high and whistle-like.
A little mouse, he called her, squeaking and snuffling.
Cecilia cried over it, because she was not sure he was wrong.
In the vast, ancient emptiness of Herne House, she scurries along the corridors unnoticed, padding silently up the sweeping staircase, the noise of her own breathing flat against her ears.
The house is so old it is as though it swallows her up in the expanse of its own past, as though she could cease to exist entirely.
Here is Camelot, Cecilia thought, when Odette first drew her across the moat to the ivy-clad walls, through drawing room and solar. Here is Avalon, Arcadia.
Dismissed by Uncle George, she is untethered. With Odette, everything has purpose; severed, she is cast adrift.
What will Oxford be? comes the traitorous thought.
An entire undoing? They will be parted for so long, with Cecilia at Oxford and Odette at Cambridge.
Summer will stretch for weeks yet, but she has been bracing herself for the autumn, arranging it in her mind so that she can make some sense of it.
Odette wants to go to university on her own, so Cecilia will want it, too; they will split for a time and it will only prove their love more constant, a test, or that is how she makes herself understand it.
Cecilia can wait for Odette to be ready for their life together.
But it wasn’t supposed to change yet.
Cecilia has heard nothing of an Aunt Claudine. She does not know what to make of this new actor upon the stage.
Her mother is in her room, sat before her dressing table, a pot of rouge open but discarded. She holds an oblong of paper in her hands, unfolded to be read.
‘Is it true Aunt Lydia’s sister will be staying?’ asks Cecilia, tucking herself against the doorframe so that Penelope will not see her grass-stained skirts. ‘We found her downstairs and now they are all talking in private.’
Penelope glances at her, distracted. ‘Then leave them to it.’
‘I didn’t know Aunt Lydia had a sister. Did you know she was coming?’
Penelope shoves the paper into a drawer, shooing Cecilia from the room. ‘So many questions! Anyone would think you’d been brought up in the gutter. It is rude to pry.’
‘But—’
‘Go along with you and keep out of the way.’
The door shuts firmly in Cecilia’s face.
She scowls, as there is no one about to see. If Odette were here, she would do such a perfect impression of Penelope’s tone, the twist of her mouth, that Cecilia’s frustration would dissolve at once.
Fine. She will keep out of the way.
Halfway along the twisting corridor that runs the spine of the Jacobean wing is a section of panelling that does not lie flush to the wall.
If Cecilia hooks her nails into the edge of the grain just so, she can prise out the panel that swings on concealed hinges.
She steps through and finds herself in blessed darkness.
For a moment, all she does is breathe. She is truly invisible now, a mouse behind the skirting boards.
The old servants’ passages were closed up not long after Cecilia was born.
When Uncle George inherited Herne House from his uncle, he declared them unfit for purpose, too narrow and dirty and poorly maintained.
He considered himself a great radical; allowing his servants to see daylight was an act of magnanimity on his part.
Now, they are all but derelict, the home of spiders and crawling things, broken furniture, leaks and smells and, in the bottom of the house, seeping, stagnant water.
The first summer she spent at Herne House, Cecilia discovered a way into the passages through the old priest hole beneath the stairs, in which Odette would lock her when they played at Reformation.
She tried to share the passages with her, but Odette disliked the dark, recoiling, frightened, so Cecilia banished it from their play – and kept it for herself.
She is much larger now than she was then, and it is far more difficult to pass through the narrow space noiselessly, but she still remembers which steps to jump over, where the floor is broken or the ceiling lower.
At a shaft of light, Cecilia stops. Crouching, she can see into her mother’s room. Penelope is at her dressing table again, the piece of paper back in her hand. Whatever it says, it is apparently more important than her daughter.
Along the passage, she comes to the next spyhole, a break between the hidden door and the panelling, looking into Leo’s room.
It is in its usual state: strewn with clothes, books, papers, collars hanging off the door handle, shaving kit spread about, socks hanging out of the drawers.
Once the books would have been poetry, now they are solid tomes on torts and contracts.
She does not understand how her brother has managed to reinvent himself so completely, cutting out all feeling and sentiment as though with a razor, and recasting himself as a rational legal mind.
She wants to watch him, to understand who her brother has become.
He is not there.
Boring.
There are any number of freshly aired guest rooms waiting for the arrivals tomorrow, all as dull as dirt, then at the end of the passage a narrow flight of stairs with several steps missing. At the bottom, she can spy on the morning room – but Odette, Uncle George and Claudine are gone.
Is she alone in the world?
Sometimes, she wonders if any of this is real.
Perhaps they are all only marionettes in the paper theatre of some invisible giant, heads lolling and arms jerking about as they are tugged this way and that.
Or perhaps it is all some great dream of a sleeping god?
She has never been sure if she is the same sort of human as everyone else.
Even Odette seems alien to her at times, a creature of action and want and purpose.
Cecilia thinks of herself like the blank space around the object.
Aunt Lydia has told her about the principles of art, as she herself was taught them as a young woman at the Slade.
The artist was called to look at the empty space as much as the thing itself – the shape of absence, without which, presence would be lost entirely.
Cecilia liked that.
Upstairs again, she looks for Odette in her room and finds nothing but a cold grate and silence.
Then, unexpectedly, voices.
A snatch of conversation draws her along the passage – Uncle George and an unfamiliar woman, who must be Claudine.
‘. . . you have me here – now what? What are you going to do?’
Cecilia frowns and presses her eye to the narrow gap around the concealed door. She can see a snatch of colour, a travelling gown, then black – legs – Uncle George.
He laughs in his placatory way. ‘Unpack, rest. All that can come later.’
All what?
‘You mean to keep me here like some entertainment. It is childish of her not to see me. I thought you said—’
‘Lydia will come around. You’ll see. She’ll have her little tantrum today, and then tomorrow it will have all blown over.’
‘Blown over?’ Claudine’s voice is rich with scorn.
‘Unpack. Settle in.’
Uncle George has come into this woman’s bedroom, alone. They are a bohemian household, yes, but this is – this is—
Now there is some softer exchange that Cecilia cannot make out, then the sound of feet receding. George leaves.
A sigh. Bedsprings creaking. Claudine remains.
Cecilia is torn. Should she follow George? Find Odette? Or stay to learn what she can of this stranger?
A new voice stills her before she can decide.
‘Claudine.’
She recognises this one at once.
‘Penelope,’ says Claudine.
‘What do you mean by sending me this?’ Penelope stands in the doorway, clutching the note, pale as milk.
Claudine’s lip curls, cat-like. ‘You found it, then.’
Cecilia presses her eye closer to the gap, shifting to see more of the room.
‘Whatever you think you have discovered, I can assure you, you are wrong.’
‘Oh, I really don’t think I am.’
‘Nonsense.’ Penelope hesitates for a moment, then rips the paper up into smaller and smaller pieces. She moves to toss the paper into the grate, but the fire is unlit, so instead she throws them at Claudine’s feet. ‘It is a fabrication.’
Claudine rises. Before, in the morning room, she seemed stiff; now she comes into focus, brought into sharp relief by purpose.
There is a radiating sense of danger that Cecilia can hardly place.
It is not that Claudine speaks threateningly, nor moves with violence, but it is as though some barely contained anger swells within her and fills the room with its scent.
‘Lydia told me everything, you know,’ says Claudine. ‘You called yourself my friend first, but you dropped me so quickly I could never quite understand it, until she told me exactly what she knew about you—’
‘Stop. Must you drag all this up again?’ Penelope backs up against the fireplace, one hand thrust out in protest. Cecilia has always understood her mother as the dancer she once was – a performer, a creature of shape and artifice – and even now, when her disquiet seems too real, Penelope finds a way to strike a pose.
‘I will not let you have your fun at my expense again,’ says Claudine. ‘This time, you will help me, or I will tell everyone. You will be finished.’
Penelope wavers, a narrow opening that can be grasped, pried apart. ‘Help you with what?’
Claudine hooks their arms together. ‘Walk with me. There is much I would discuss.’
Penelope resists for only a moment before allowing herself to be led out.
Cecilia waits, breath held, palm flat against the door, for any sound of their return. Her heart beats in her chest like a hammer against the anvil of her ribs.
Noiselessly, she pushes the door open and scurries across the rug to pick up a fallen scrap. The creamy paper makes her think of the formal documents sent to her from Oxford.
There is only one piece of writing, in a looping hand: Penel.
Before she can reach for another piece, there are footsteps and voices, and in a flash, the secret door is closed. Cecilia races away along her mousehole, as though even this small discovery could be stolen from her.