Chapter 25
25
‘Seth?’ she whispered. Her tears immediately halted. She knew without question that the voice was not a concerned visitor at her bedroom door, but a bewildered enquiry not two foot from her head and directly the other side of the wall. Everything was still for a few moments and she realised that her reply had not been heard. She repeated the name, saying it louder the second time, as she stared at the bricks before her in disbelief.
‘ Seth ?’
Of course, she thought to herself, this was inevitable. The voice had returned as a product of her grief. She was only surprised that it had taken so long. Where had her imaginary friend been back in December when her world had totally collapsed for the second time? The inner voice of her own creation from before the war, who had helped her to cope with the death of her parents, had failed to return to help her navigate the unthinkable: the death of her fiancé. She’d spent all this time alone. He was five months too late.
‘Is that really you?’ Seth queried, and she thought she detected a half-chuckle in his tone. ‘The voice I spent two years thinking was a ghost until you made the wild claim that your parents died on some ship that never even sunk?’
She wiped the back of her hand across her wet cheeks. ‘My parents did perish aboard the Titanic . Why would I make something like that up? You’re the one with fanciful tales of living in a world I don’t recognise.’ She groaned. ‘Oh, how I curse my vivid imagination. I have relied on the fantasies in my head as an escape for so long, but the real world has dealt me crushing blow after crushing blow and I sometimes feel there is no point to anything any more.’
Her breaths were still catching in her throat and she twisted around to reach for a cotton handkerchief on the nightstand, before returning her head to the pillow and the position she had always heard the voice the clearest.
‘Ha, I’d forgotten what a dramatic soul you could be. Well, now, I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed our silly bickering and your nonsense that you were a medieval, lovelorn princess who’d launched herself from the tower after being jilted. Course, I dint believe it for a second and spent weeks trying to work out how you’d got in the tower. But whatever the truth, I’m delighted to hear from you again. So much so, that I don’t care if you’re a bored girl from the village who’s ribbing me, you’re in my head or even if you are talking to me from another version of my own world – although that last one is the most nonsense of all, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ she echoed.
‘And I’m mightily disappointed to hear you sounding so glum at such an uplifting time of year. Can you not see Mother Nature bursting into life all about? The titty-totty shoots, poking their bright-green heads through the soil? Do you not smell the good, clean air hereabouts? A smell to gladden a man’s soul, I can tell you. And have you not heard the sweet call of the cuckoo, announcing its arrival and a sure sign that summer is on her way?’
‘Someone sounds more cheerful than I remember,’ she mumbled, still bewildered that her brain had conjured up the hallucination of her adolescence, and thinking that she hadn’t heard her first cuckoo yet, but she knew that the head gardener, Rowe, had told Her Ladyship he had. The return of the voice must be because she was back in the tower, she reasoned. There had always been something odd about this place.
‘I wouldn’t say I’m exactly skipping about, full of boundless joy, but I’m generally a more chipper soul and look for reasons every day to be so. It’s good to be back at Merriford after my time away, and even better to reconnect with an old friend.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘I dint expect to hear from you ever again,’ he said. ‘I’d rationalised you away. You dint come to me in my darkest hours so I decided p’rhaps I’d got my head sorted and you’d served your purpose.’
Olivia felt a prickling sensation crawl across her skin. There was something not right about this whole situation; she just couldn’t put her finger on what it was. It was certainly strange that he talked of being away, as though he were a real man who had the ability to leave the tower.
‘But I’m glad that you’re back,’ the voice continued, ‘so that I can say thank you, if nothing else. God but I was a miserable sod back then, wrapped up in my own misfortunes.’
She shifted over onto her tummy and sniffed.
‘You were,’ she agreed. ‘But I was merciless in my teasing.’
‘No, I needed to hear it, even though it took a couple of years for it to all sink in. I thought my life was at rock bottom, back then. Ha,’ he scoffed. ‘I had no idea how bad it was about to get. And in my quiet moments, I often thought back to our strange conversations. Your joy shone through, and your determination that life was for living. How you regretted tossing yourself from the tower because you could’ve gone on adventures and written books about them.’
It was uncomfortable for Olivia to hear him talk of her positivity, especially as Benji had told her off for barely coping. Where had that daredevil, carefree child gone? All her plans to follow in her father’s footsteps and to forge new paths of her own had evaporated, along with her hopes of marriage and happiness. How utterly patronising of her to assume she could tell another to shake himself off, dust himself down and step forward to embrace life.
‘Where have you been, then?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes. ‘You said it’s good to be back as though you’ve been away.’
‘Doing my bit for King and Country. The history books’ll call it the Great War, and I doubt we’ll ever see the likes again – not in my lifetime, at least.’
Olivia felt her body go cold at his words. ‘You want me to believe you were a part of it? Out there in the trenches of France, fighting against the Ottoman Empire, or enduring the harsh climate of East Africa?’
‘Wasn’t every patriotic soul of fighting age? I signed up back in the August of fourteen, not many days after I’d got merry with the lads in the bothy and you came out with that strange tale about the ship sinking.’ There was a contemplative pause. ‘Guess I was trying to give my life a bit of meaning. I saw action in Belgium and northern France and was discharged last month, when the Fairchilds kindly took me on again.’
‘ The Fairchilds ?’
Those creeping prickles intensified. Had he been playing her all this time? Was he some local lad who had conducted an elaborate prank on her all those years ago and was now outside, speaking to her through a pipe and making her think he was in the tower? Her mild curiosity side-stepped into anger. Her fists became balls, gripping at bunches of the linen sheets, as her nostrils flared. To play such a prank as this, when everyone knew what the Fairchilds had gone through, was beyond cruel.
‘Who exactly are you?’
‘I told you, back when we first started talking. My name is Seth – Seth Tanner. I’m one of the undergardeners here.’