Chapter 7
7
Summer was Olivia’s favourite season. Long hours of daylight, Mother Nature offering up her bounty, and a kaleidoscope of colours everywhere you looked. It made her more determined than ever to focus on her future, and she made an effort to daydream less and pay attention to her lessons more. She’d been at Merriford for a couple of months now and felt grateful that she was fed and clothed, and was receiving a good education, when so many people did not have these things. Every day, she looked for reasons to be cheerful.
Another survivor had sold their story to the newspapers on the back of the Titanic inquiry, so her positivity helped to ease the resurgence of her grief to a degree, as did the gentle awakening of her womanhood. She would be fourteen that autumn and different things mattered to her now. For example, if there were young lads around, she cared more than was necessary about her appearance, but it was not the Fairchild sons who made her self-conscious; instead, it was the taciturn Tanner. With his emerald eyes and dark, wavy hair, he had the potential to look exceedingly attractive – if only he would smile, instead of wearing a crumpled frown every time she came across him. The frequency with which their paths crossed started to increase, because if he was trimming hedges down by the river, deadheading roses in the formal borders that edged the lawns, or digging up vegetables in the walled kitchen gardens, she deliberately chose to loiter nearby.
After the tranquillity of the Japanese gardens, the kitchen garden was one of her favourite places to be. It was, by virtue of being enclosed, a suntrap and a secret space, with espaliered fruit trees and neat rows of vegetables within equally neat beds of soil. Gravel paths criss-crossed the patch of land and a solitary wooden bench stood at the far end. The object of Olivia’s affections was busy within the large greenhouse that stood up against the south-facing wall. She remembered Benji saying how he’d been allowed to plant seeds with Tanner so she walked over and stood in the doorway. Although not strictly a member of the Fairchild family, she knew her position was elevated enough to get away with disturbing him.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, watching his nimble fingers work along the rows of dark-green tomato plants.
‘Morning, miss.’ He nodded but looked irritated to have someone questioning him. ‘Pinching out the side shoots.’
She stepped down into the sunken space. Shelves of dense foliage and ripening red fruits towered above her, accompanied by the unique tomato plant aroma: a musky earthiness. The wrought-iron roof vents had been cranked open but it was still oppressively hot inside – lovely for the tomatoes but too muggy for people.
Tanner eyed her as she approached but kept his head facing forwards, his wide fingernails nipping the shoots as he worked swiftly up each plant.
‘May I help? I promise to follow your instructions carefully.’
‘I’m not sure it would be?—’
‘It’s so hard having no close family left in the world. All I want is some quiet, and to occupy myself with some useful task to stop me dwelling on… things, as the Fairchild boys are too boisterous for me.’
‘And yet Benji told me you fought the Spaniards and charged towards a maraudin’ Viking army. You clearly embrace a boisterous side on occasion.’ He turned his head to hers and raised one eyebrow.
‘Please?’
There was an almost inaudible sigh to her right.
‘Very well, miss. Start on the row afore you. You’re looking for the titty-totty shoots between the main stalk and the leaf stems. Like this – see? Use your thumb and forefinger to nip them out. It makes the plant focus on ripening the fruit, rather than growing more leaves.’
He showed her what to do and she undertook her task in earnest, occasionally hearing grunts from him as she kept up a steady but nervous chatter.
When they were finished, she followed him outside.
‘I reckon you’d best be off now, miss. I don’t think the master would approve of you doing my job.’
She reluctantly made her way back to the iron gate just as Lady Fairchild entered.
‘Olivia, what are you doing in here?’
‘Tanner was showing me the tomatoes. He is always more than happy to have me follow him about.’ The last part was a definite exaggeration, but she didn’t want to get into trouble with Her Ladyship for bothering the young man.
The older woman glanced across at her gardener and then back to her, narrowing her eyes, as Olivia skipped back to the house, wondering if it would ever be possible to fly an aeroplane to the moon.
* * *
Benji was reading the latest edition of the Boys’ Own Paper , earnestly studying a section on how to make a canoe, when Olivia sought him out later that afternoon. Howard would not get away with picking on him, because she would go out of her way to make up for the thoughtlessness of his brothers.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re going on a grand adventure.’
‘Are we?’ His face became quite animated, and he certainly didn’t need telling twice, as he leapt to his feet and all thoughts of canoes vanished.
‘Apparently, there’s a castle not far from here. I was reading up about it in a book from the library. Your mother was kind enough to speak to the owners – who are personal friends of hers. We’re to have a private tour. One of the stable hands helped me sort out two bicycles and Cook has made us some sandwiches. You can ride?’ she asked.
‘Of course I can ride and I know of the place. But can we not go out of the village past the shrieking pits, please? They’re haunted. Clarence told me Ernest has been scaring everyone with his spooky sightings.’
‘You don’t need to be frightened of ghosts,’ she said, trying to reassure the young boy. ‘My governess said the pits are just pools of water along the lode where medieval people dug for iron. Over time, they’ve filled up like small ponds.’
A vein of metal ore ran through the earth in Merriford, so people mining this precious resource nearby made sense.
‘But they do shriek,’ he insisted.
‘Only when the wind rushes over them, making a wailing sound, like when you blow across a bottle top.’
But Benji was having none of it.
‘A madman haunts the pits, waving an axe and threatening anyone who comes near. He murdered his wife and the shrieking is her cries. I know Louis thinks it’s all nonsense but I don’t want to go near them.’
‘We have no choice unless we go the long way round. Besides, I don’t think we’ll come across ghosts in the day. And, if we do, I can look after us.’ She swished her arm in a figure of eight as though she was fighting off an opponent with a sword and Benji smiled.
Howard teased them over their planned outing when he saw them heading off, but Olivia suspected he was sore not to be invited. He might profess to find the pair of them too young to hang about with, but who wouldn’t want a thrilling bicycle ride to a fifteenth-century castle, with sandwiches and fresh peaches thrown in? He was jealous, she decided, and it served him right.
In the end, despite moderate rain for most of their journey and Benji complaining that his legs ached every fifty yards, the pair had a lovely afternoon. The owners of the castle had instructed their housekeeper to show the youngsters around, and the lively old woman amused them with tales of derring-do. She even pointed out a delightful priest hole under the main staircase.
But when they returned, Benji was distraught to find the sketchbooks that he’d left on the nursery table had been defaced.
‘I know it was Howie,’ he said, trying not to cry. ‘Look at these stupid faces drawn across pictures that took me hours.’
Olivia was incandescent. This bullying behaviour had to stop. She stormed downstairs and found out from the housekeeper that Master Howard had gone to the estate woods looking for some sport, so she set off to deal with him once and for all.
When she finally located him, he was taking pot shots at birds with his catapult. She ducked behind a tree and watched him for a while, wondering whether an out-and-out confrontation was her best move, when he disappeared into the isolated brick privy near the gamekeeper’s hut and she had a much better idea. Trying not to make a sound, she wedged a nearby spade under the door handle, making it impossible to open from the inside. She heard him call out for help but she marched back to the house without a backwards glance.
Over two hours later, he approached her, red-faced and seething.
‘I know it was you.’
‘Come, come, don’t get your petticoats in a twist. I simply forgot you were in there. It was just a bit of fun.’ She flung his words from when he’d locked Benji in the sheds back at him.
‘If you weren’t a girl, I might thump you.’
‘If you weren’t an idiot, I might like you, Sprinkles…’ She couldn’t help but focus on his freckled face, even though she saw Howard’s nostrils flare at the nickname.
They stared at each other long and hard, but his eyes dropped first. With nothing further to say, he stomped off.
When Benji heard about what Olivia had done, he threw his arms about her – which was a first for a Fairchild.
‘I’m really glad you came to live here,’ he said. ‘You’re still strange but I like that you stand up to my brothers.’
‘It was all that practise I had fighting the Spanish,’ she joked. ‘And hey, we don’t know what the future holds. It’s yet to be revealed to us. You could well end up richer, taller, stronger, more important in the world than all of them put together. Wouldn’t that be something?’
Benji grinned at the thought.
* * *
As Olivia lay across her bed that night, she tried to analyse Howard’s behaviour. Most bullies were cowards and backed down when confronted – one of the reasons they picked on the vulnerable. But Howard wasn’t an unkind lad; he was seeking attention, that was all. It must be hard to get noticed when you were one of four, and it didn’t help that he wasn’t the important eldest, the academically gifted second child, or the much-cosseted youngest.
She started to drift off, living out a fantasy in her mind where she and Tanner were working together in the gardens of a small country house five years into the future. Her thirteen-year-old brain hadn’t quite got to grips with the knotty problem of the class divide, but she was comforted that Dickens, Hardy, Trollope and even Charlotte Bront? had written romances addressing this. Jane Eyre proved that love conquered all, although she desperately hoped that neither she nor Tanner had to end up horribly disfigured in order for their love to flourish.
These images were dancing across her mind when she was suddenly jolted back to reality by some rather coarse language through the wall.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ To a young girl’s ears, it was quite shocking, and certainly not a word she’d ever heard her father use. ‘That little shit.’
She wondered if the person was talking to someone else but she leaned closer to the wall and could only hear the solitary male voice she’d heard before.
‘Language!’ she reprimanded.
The scuffling and grunts from through the wall stopped.
‘You again! Where the hell are you?’
The voice was undoubtedly coming from the other room, and she heard the squeak of a bed. The man must have climbed onto it because his voice was suddenly louder, booming through the brickwork, and she could almost feel the vibrations. This made no sense – there wasn’t a bed in there.
‘Are you responsible for the damn hoppin’ toad?’
‘What are you doing in the east tower?’ she asked.
‘What are you doing in the east tower? Women in’t allowed in here.’
It was rather the other way about, and this man must surely know that she had the tower now. It was men who were most definitely not allowed; hence Lady Fairchild posting Ruth as a sentry on the ground floor.
The sound of stomping feet faded to nothing. Olivia pressed her ear closer to the bricks but heard no more. She turned to the bedroom door, expecting the man to come bounding in and continue his shouty rant, but there was nothing. She reluctantly slid from her covers, her feet hitting the cold floorboards, despite the warm summer temperature, and she lit the chamberstick by the bed. Holding it steady, she went out to the spiral staircase to confront the intruder. But like on the previous occasion, there was no one there, and nor was there anyone in her dressing room.
She returned and clambered back into bed, only to be chastised through the wall again.
‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t like being made a fool of. How’re you doing it? Pipes or what?’
‘ You don’t appreciate it?’ She was incredulous. ‘You’re the one in the tower when you have no right to be here.’
‘I have no right? You’re the intruder. Are you some kind of ghost?’
This ridiculous notion had actually occurred to her, more so since Benji’s tales of the madman haunting the shrieking pits, as she was running out of logical explanations, but it was amusing that the spirit was the one accusing her of such.
‘Were you murdered in the tower and can’t find your way to the afterlife?’ he asked. ‘Some medieval child who succumbed to the plague who won’t accept she’s dead? As if my life couldn’t get any worse. Show yourself then. Float through the wall or something. I really hope you aren’t headless. I can prob’ly cope with you if you are just a pale, floaty, see-through entity, but I’m not great with dismemberment.’
Olivia laughed then. This was silly. He was the spectral visitant, unaccepting of his situation and cantankerous to boot. There was a silence before she heard the springs and assumed he’d also climbed back into his non-existent bed.
‘Must’ve been working too hard in the heat and should’ve drunk more water today,’ he muttered to himself.
‘Ghosts don’t drink,’ she pointed out, but he didn’t respond.
She laid her head on the pillow and stared at the wooden ceiling. Was the voice real? Or had she conjured up the whole thing? It would be such a shame if, just when she thought she’d got to grips with her grief, her wild imagination had got the better of her. Sophie, the imaginary friend of her infancy, had been her creation but she’d always been in total control of what the invisible girl had said and done. This was different. This was unsettling. Maybe she should investigate the history of the east tower. Find out if someone had died there in the past.
She rolled onto her side and blew out the candle as a final thought occurred to her.
‘One more thing and then I’ll leave you to wander the grounds, clanking your chains and wailing.’ She’d read Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost and was basing her limited knowledge of other-worldly manifestations on this amusing novella. ‘Do you have a name?’ she asked, hoping this might help her get to the bottom of his tragic demise.
There was a begrudging snort from the other side before he answered.
‘Seth,’ he said. It was a biblical name so he could have been born any time in the last two thousand years, but it gave her somewhere to start. ‘Do you?’
‘Cordelia,’ she said, because it was the name of the heroine in the Gothic novel she was reading. Everyone at Merriford Manor knew exactly who she was, from the scullery maid to the visiting farrier. If this voice didn’t know that the young Miss Davenport was now residing in the tower, perhaps he was a ghost, after all.
‘Well, Cordelia, if you would kindly drift off to another part of the house and scare the hell out of someone else, I’d appreciate it. I need my sleep.’
‘With pleasure,’ she said, and pulled the coverlet over her head to block out the unsettling voice and all the possible implications.