Chapter Three
“Wow!” Rani looks around my room, impressed by the luxury, and I don’t blame her. It is pretty next-level. Everything at Castle
Beaumont is. There are a lot of half-derelict and flat-out ruined castles in this country, but not here. It opens its gardens
and part of the castle for the public, for a fee of course. It hosts weddings, balls, throws Christmas extravaganzas and Easter
egg hunts, and of course every summer the great and good come to vote on the Beaumont Prize. Possibly the most lucrative aspect
is its frequent appearances in TV shows and movies, where it seems to be the go-to stately home from every period drama you
can think of. The Beaumont family runs this huge building like a business, and that means they can keep every room in the
same swanky style as it has always been.
When I tell you that I’m in a castle, you might imagine a drafty old grey stone thing with battlements and dungeons.
Castle Beaumont is nothing like that: It’s Austen, it’s Bridgerton.
Its heating bill must be enormous. It’s a glorious symmetrical Georgian mansion set in the middle of beautifully landscaped grounds that are filled with a lake, a maze, and a selection of follies, temples, towers, and mini castles that turn the grounds into a living, breathing fairy tale.
There’s even a village just for the people who work Castle Beaumont to live in, made up of pretty little houses and cottages
that look like they should be featured on postcards.
I’d like to be laid-back and cynical about all the beauty and glamour. But the thing is, I grew up in care homes and sometimes
a few weeks in a semidetached with foster carers, so this is like a fairy tale and I’m sort of super smart Cinders. When I was a kid there wasn’t much in the way of comfort. Oh, you
know, I got fed, and a bed, and sometimes there would be a trip to holiday camp and someone would force me to rappel off something.
At Christmas I’d get gifts that strangers donated for Girl Aged 10 (or whatever age I was that year) but never anything chosen
with just me in mind. The places I lived in were safe and clean but never luxuriously beautiful just for the sake of it, never
fit for a girl who read about princesses. And there were grown-ups who were kind to me, helped and encouraged me. But nobody
loved me. No one ever cared more about me than they did anyone else in the world. Not until Rani. So even though I know this room
existed long before I was ever invited to come to Castle Beaumont, just the fact that I will be sleeping here tonight exactly
because of who I am and what I’ve achieved feels almost like a homecoming. Like I’m coming home to all the dreams I never thought
would come true and this is the proof that I matter after all.
“I feel a bit like I might get thrown out for trespassing,” I tell Rani.
“You hit the big-time, babe,” Rani says. “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“What’s Kansas got to do with it?” I ask her.
“It’s from The Wizard of Oz.”
“Oh. Well, this isn’t Kansas and I get to feel like the heroine in a hot romance novel, and I am here for that. As long as
no-one tells me off for trespassing.”
I caught a glimpse of Rani’s room on the way to mine. Her walls are lined with a gorgeous peachy pink silk that’s printed
with birds of paradise in various states of flight. Walking into my room feels like walking into a tranquil blue lagoon. It’s
decorated in a light silvery turquoise silk, with a softly gleaming silver design printed onto it. My room back at the flat
I share with Rani, over her shop, is just the same as it was on the day I moved in. A sort of dingy cream colour with a bed,
and all my possessions arranged so I can see them all at once. Rani despairs of my interior design skills, but as much as
I love the colour and chic she has unleashed on the rest of our apartment, I feel like I’ve got at least another two years
of thinking about how I want my room to look before I commit to a colour scheme.
Maybe I want it to look like my castle room. Maybe my design aesthetic is newly acquired taste for princess stuff.
In the middle of the room is the kind of four-poster bed that looks like Henry VIII might have slept in it, which isn’t totally impossible, as it happens.
There’s a dressing table, with one of those princess standard triple mirrors.
A wardrobe that could possibly provide a direct route to Narnia, and over the fireplace a portrait of a beautiful young woman, from around the early 1800s, I think, dressed in a blue silk gown.
Holding her hand is a toddler with rosy cheeks and blond curls, in a little white lace frock.
It’s a touching moment between a mother and child that catches at my heart.
I was a toddler with a mum once, but not for very long.
Hence the clean and kind kids’ home and the sense that I never really belong anywhere, but look, I’m not one to dwell. Fine, I do dwell a bit.
“Your bathroom is in a turret!” Rani exclaims, going into the small tower room and switching on the light. “Your bathroom
is turret shaped! This is the life, Ava. Can we hatch a plan to move our lives here forever and ever?”
“You’d miss the store,” I tell her. “You know those dresses are as much your family as I am, and Mrs. and Mrs. Shah for that
matter.”
“Fair comment,” Rani agrees. “Okay then, we’ll just make best friends with Lord and Lady B, and get them to invite us over
for shooting parties, or whatever it is the aristocrats do.”
“I’m not shooting anything,” I tell her. “Ah good, my stuff.”
It’s a relief to see that my bags have been placed at the end of the bed, on a great big carved chest. My laptop, my clock,
my soft toy sheep, which yeah, all right, I’m thirty-five, but I’ve slept with it every single night of my life. Flopping
down onto the feather-stuffed mattress feels like I imagine it does to be greeted by a long-lost lover would, not that I’ve
ever had one of those. Or one whose whereabouts I know of, for that matter.
“I’m going to go back down to the party,” Rani tells me, after throwing a pair of pyjamas at me. “I was chatting with this
stupidly, totally fit feller just before you threw wine at that poet and he is exactly my type.”
“I thought we’d agreed that your type is to be avoided at all costs,” I caution her. Rani has a habit of falling for guys
who are charming but shallow.
“I know, but what’s the point of being in a fancy dress in a castle if I can’t flirt a bit!”
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Alex . . . Beaumont,” she half mutters. “The next Lord of Castle Beaumont, or something, I dunno, whatevers.”
“Rani!” I muster a gasp! “You are flirting with aristocracy! It’s a dangerous game. One minute it’s all laughs, the next there’s
a guillotine. I’ve read the books.”
“Not really, darling. It’s just a bit of fun,” Rani reassures me. “You’ll be okay, won’t you?”
“I will be asleep.” I nod.
“Promise me you’ll take that dress off first,” Rani reminds me. “It’s got to go back into stock tomorrow.”
“How much demand is there for looking like you are wearing a Cheeto?”
“I admit, I made the wrong selection that time, but tomorrow I shall bring you such fashion wonders as you have never seen!”
“I still don’t understand why I can’t just wear my normal stuff,” I mutter.
“Because your normal stuff is usually reserved for bedtime or insane asylums,” Rani tells me, opening my bedroom door. “Set
your alarm!”
Once the heavy door has drawn shut, I crawl into my pj’s and then into bed. The mattress is soft and warm, and I like the
way the heavy curtains around the bed make me feel cosy and safe. When I turn off the bedside lamp, I realise I forgot to
draw the curtains, but I don’t mind. The moonlight streams in through the window, giving the room a silvery quality, and it
is so, so quiet.
That’s when it hits me. The reason why Hal Babbage is the living embodiment of my perfect man.
Since I was fourteen years old my perfect man was the male lead in a series of dystopian novels.
Hal Babbage looks exactly like my teenage book boyfriend, Kai Raider from The Apocalypse Games.
I mean exactly like. Weirdly exactly like.
Reaching over the side of the bed, I feel around in my bag until I find my omnibus edition, which I reserve for travel,
as my three original editions have been read so many times that now they are on the verge of falling apart, and I love those
books like they are living things.
It’s hard to have anything that belongs to just you when you grow up in a children’s home. I had Lamby and when I was a little
older The Apocalypse Games trilogy, which I protected with my life and once defended from attempted theft so violently that
I broke my wrist. Still, the other kids knew not to mess with me after that.
Everything I know about life and love I learned from those books and Rani.
I’d like to say the apocalypse survival stuff has never come in handy, but it’s increasingly looking like it might be useful to know how to make a bunker.
And if there ever was a situation that required some teenagers to lead a revolt against fascism, then I’d know all the moves.
But until today my dream of Kai Raider stayed firmly between the pages of my books, glowering and being misunderstood.
Now I’ve met someone scarily similar to him in real life, I’m just as afraid of talking to him as I am with every other human being on Earth.
As if a perfect specimen like him would be into a tall, awkwardly busty, ginger girl with skin so pale that you can’t look at it directly on a bright day without risking the health of your corneas.
So, it’s probably best to pretend he doesn’t exist. Probably best to tuck this book under my pillow and not compare Hal to Kai at all.
Probably best to do what I do best: develop world-changing tech in a nice quiet room.
As soon as I think about FreeThought my body relaxes, and my mind starts to drift into a dream of ideas. He will certainly
have something interesting to say about the Hal paradox. He always has something interesting to say.
Just then I notice one silvery patch of moonlight in the corner of the room, dancing and flickering like a flame right in
the centre of the painting of the woman and the child. It seems to be getting bigger, longer, and brighter until it almost
resembles the figure of . . . a woman. Long and misty, she seems to be wearing a gown, a blue gown.
“Are you a ghost?” I ask the figure gently, so as not to frighten it away. But the moment I talk to it, it seems to flare
into a shower of sparks and fades away into a faintly sparkling dust.
Remember this when you wake up, I tell myself. You always did want to meet a ghost, and if you are going to do that anywhere it’s going to be here.
For a scientist I am oddly whimsical. It is what it is.