Chapter Three
Theo abandoned the tray on a sideboard in the entrance hall, and stopped to stare into the big, speckled mirror.
What did he see? What had he seen? The need to know was excruciating.
The sun had picked out the freckles over her nose, but, washed silver by the mirror, she hardly recognised herself.
The truth was, if she didn’t know how Toby saw her, then she wasn’t sure how to see herself.
They’d held hands, when they were little – a simple, tacit acknowledgement that here was a kindred spirit.
They’d talked about being grown up, and getting married.
It had been as natural as breathing. When had that ended?
Had it been when Toby turned twelve, and the vicar took over his schooling, and spoke of going up?
Toby had always been the serious sort, his straight brows and dark eyes giving him a hawkish look.
Since early childhood Theo had loved his sudden, beautiful smiles; she’d loved being the cause of them.
Then one day, around the time he suddenly shot up in height, they’d been walking along the lane hand in hand when one of the farmers came by on his cob.
Toby had shaken her off abruptly. She remembered it clearly – the sting of it, and not understanding why.
She took a deep breath, stopped staring in the mirror, and went to her father’s study.
Behind its heavy oak door lay a realm of shadows and silence.
Seymour Hallewell had been a scholar of sorts, a man of many hobbies, who’d written undistinguished books on all sorts of subjects.
From a long time ago, before her sister’s death, Theo remembered a man with gentle hands, who’d carried her on his shoulders and sung songs about dragons.
He’d been more or less a recluse by the end, rarely venturing from his room.
When he’d died in there, it was two days before anyone realised.
The room had simply been abandoned after that; Diana never went in, so the servants hardly bothered to.
But Theo knew where to find a few useful things: in a pile of pennies and pencil shavings on Seymour’s desk sat a silver half-crown. She snatched it up. One of the things she needed for her ritual to summon Lord Abrecan. To summon him, and Toby Meriwether.
It won’t work, Toby had said, because it obviously won’t. How sharply that had cut. How painful it was to feel the edges of her make-believe world, her own sense of wonder, threatening to crumble.
Dinner that night was a painful affair. Theo’s mother seated her far enough from Uncle Crudge for it to be impossible to join in his conversation with the Misses Hart – a pair of bookish spinster sisters – and close enough to Dr and Mrs Mackie for it to be obvious that she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to them.
What could one politely enquire of a person who was dying, and of the person having to watch her do so?
Their end of the table was a stiff, uncomfortable place, where the sip of asparagus soup and the crunch of radish salad made Theo’s skin crawl. She longed to escape.
Later on and finally free, Theo loitered by the display case in the corner of the long hall.
In it were the best of the Hallewell artefacts unearthed over the years.
There were several coins, and a medieval gold posy ring shaped as clasped hands, with a French inscription meaning: My Heart is With You.
A lot of musket balls, arrowheads, shoe buckles and clay pipes; and the top half of a lead statuette of a woman, a devotional piece dating from the eleventh century.
Hearing murmured voices, Theo glanced up to see Crudge and Arnaud heading upstairs to their rooms. They did not see her.
Her uncle carried a newspaper under his arm, and when he reached for the banister, he dropped it.
Arnaud picked it up and tucked it under his own arm, and the way he looked at Crudge had none of his usual froideur.
His smile was unguarded, and charming, and Theo felt oddly relieved.
Crudge rested an affectionate hand on Arnaud’s shoulder as they climbed.
When they’d gone, Theo returned to the display case.
The coin she needed was more or less the same size as the half-crown in her pocket, and even though it’d been buried for more than a thousand years, the silver was still bright.
The words Elfred Rex were clear. King Alfred the Great, who ruled the kingdom of Wessex at the end of the ninth century – when Abrecan was at Hallewell.
It was very rare, and very valuable, and Abrecan must have touched it .
. . The thought awed Theo far more than any saint’s finger bone or scrap of nun’s robe.
The key to the display case was kept in the safe in Diana’s dressing room.
Theo knew the combination, and had fetched it while her mother gossiped with the ladies in the small drawing room.
Ears straining, she switched the coins. The half-crown looked far too big and smooth once it was in position on the purple baize, but it was better than leaving an empty space.
Abrecan’s coin seemed to heat the skin of her palm.
She held it tight as she relocked the case, used her cuff to buff her fingerprints from the glass, and ran.
She replaced the key and darted into her sister’s room.
It was where she went when she needed to calm down, gather herself, be invisible again.
Nobody would find her there; no one ever came in.
It was another forgotten, untouched place.
A teal eiderdown was still on the bed; brushes and combs still on the dresser; fine woollen undergarments still packed in the trunk with sachets of camphor and lavender. The air so very still.
Their part of the house was as populous with the dead as it was with the living.
Theo stared at the single, small thumbprint on the mirror of the dressing table set, remembering the horrible day she’d been made to pose with Amy’s lolling head on her shoulder, holding her cold, lifeless hand for the camera.
Amy hadn’t smelled right. All Theo had wanted was to push her away and run, and being forbidden to do so had brought her close to hysterics.
She hadn’t seen her mother’s face for months – just its vague shape behind a heavy black veil.
Theo had felt like she was trapped, alone, at the bottom of a well.
It had only got better when Uncle Crudge came to stay, and they’d sat together in the library, poring over the atlas for hours at a time.
Ah, Mesopotamia! Fascinating, fascinating.
King Sargon and the Akkadian Empire, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!
All gone now, sad to say, and nobody’s quite sure where they were.
But perhaps we’ll go there one day and find them, shall we, Theo? You and I?
Her mother had loved her better before Amy died. And Theo dreaded her own tendency to panic, which she was sure had begun around that time. Perhaps the day of the photograph.
Once her heart had slowed she went back to her own room, undressed partly and lay in bed, in case her mother looked in.
Now that the time had almost come, the nerves were like a creature worming in her stomach.
She felt sick, and there was no danger of her falling asleep.
Much later, she heard the soft creak of floorboards as the servants finally retired, and after that was silence.
Theo watched the hands of the clock tick slowly towards twelve.
Toby couldn’t risk shutting his eyes; there was no hope of waking again if he drifted off.
He sat on the floor of their room once Kit was asleep, silently revising the events and place names in the Bible.
When the stories began to muddle with fatigue, he switched to conjugating irregular Latin verbs, because the drill was so familiar to him, and proceeded in so orderly a fashion, that mere tiredness couldn’t derail it.
Sum, es, est, eram, eras . . . He’d got all the way down to the third person pluperfect when he was interrupted by Kit, turning and mumbling in his sleep.
It was hot and stuffy in their room. Toby got to his feet in silence, and almost changed his mind at that point.
The pale shape of his still-made bed was a siren’s call to his weary brain.
But he couldn’t help thinking about earlier, at the castle, and the way he’d snapped at Theo because he’d annoyed himself by being gauche.
Be kind to her. For some reason, the implication that he’d been unkind was intolerable.
Because, now he came to think about it, Toby couldn’t remember a single occasion when Theo Hallewell had said or done an unkind thing.
Was that even possible? Surely everybody lost their patience or good humour at times?
But perhaps it was easier not to when your life was one of carefree idleness and make-believe.
He sighed. He’d said he would go, so go he must. And he’d probably be home again by a quarter past twelve, when it turned out everyone else had slept through it. He’d been staring at Kit’s half-visible form in the darkness, and jumped when his brother spoke.
‘’S’it morning, Toby?’
‘Hush, no, it’s not morning.’
There was a chance Kit would slip back into sleep as easily as he’d slipped out of it. Instead, he sat up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere. Downstairs, to study.’
‘But it’s night-time.’
‘Just . . . go back to sleep, Kit. Everything’s fine.’
‘You’re going somewhere!’
‘Shh! Be quiet, or you’ll wake Mum and Dad.’
‘Can I come?’
Toby hesitated. If he insisted, Kit might stay put. Or he might try to follow Toby in secret, which would end in chaos. He cursed inwardly as Kit hurried over to him, bringing the warm, feral smell of sleep.
‘Please can I come?’