Chapter Five
Grace
Crowthorne House, my new home. For the present.
Each day when I awoke in the beautiful pastel pink bedroom, I found it harder to believe.
I was no longer the dull, reclusive, lost daughter of Heather House.
No longer a prisoner inside its crumbling walls, flinching at the echoes of mother’s stick pounding the rotten floorboards.
Even Tom, whose friendship I had taken comfort from my whole life, had become a spectre of Heather House, another ghost to flee from.
Here, between the house and the mortuary, it seemed there were plenty of ghosts, but at least they weren’t mine.
I sat up in the thick, dusky-pink embroidered bedsheets and watched the rain snaking its lazy way down the window panes of the terrace.
I wondered again at Louisa, the woman who laid in this bed before me.
Did I really remind Nicholas of her? Did it cause him a great deal of pain, then, to look at me – let alone to keep me in this room, where he once slept with her?
What about her funeral, I wondered. Did he conduct his fiancé’s funeral? Did he wash and caress her pale, lifeless body, the same way he cared for every body he was entrusted with?
I pictured him, with his jacket hung on the peg, his white shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, his eyes cast down at her pale face. His large hand stroking the delicate strands of her hair, letting them run through his fingers like silver threads.
Cherishing her. Holding her head.
The same way my mother held my father’s head in her lap when he died.
I remembered it all too well, because it happened right in front of me.
I remembered how the light faded from his eyes like the dimming of an oil lamp.
Mother cradled his head as if it was severed, and wailed, her tears turning his hair to soft damp curls.
I watched him until his oil lamps were extinguished, never to reignite.
My father was my first dead body. The one that hardened me to death.
Now I was able to take up this job at Crowthorne House, and Nicholas could make me his apprentice, because the bodies didn’t bother me a jot.
In fact, I quite enjoyed their silent dignity, the process, the time to reflect in the quiet, just the body and me.
Thank you for that gift, father, I thought to myself. Your cruel death was the only gift you ever gave me.
The sound of knuckles rapping on the door startled me from the memory. I pulled the bedclothes up around my chest and called out.
“Come in, Maggie.”
The door opened and the trolley came in first, topped with the silver tray, the cloche, and the Royal Albert tea set. Margaret came in after it, breathless from her journey. The kitchen was large and fairly utilitarian, much like the mortuary beneath the house, and a fair way from my room.
Maggie poured my first cup of tea of the day; English breakfast with whole milk.
I lifted the cloche and peered at my breakfast; a soft-boiled egg in a black cup, a silver spoon, toast, butter, a knife, and a serving of streaky bacon.
There was a small cup of blood-red pomegranate and cranberry juice, which I sipped while Maggie stirred the tea.
“It’s been quite a few days, now, Ms Lockett – how are you settling in?” she asked, lifting the tray onto my lap as if I was too sick to arrange it myself.
“Wonderfully,” I said softly, as if I couldn’t quite believe it. “I feel like I’ve always been here.”
I’d become accustomed, very quickly, to being waited on, and to living in luxury.
I hadn’t even thought of venturing outside and exploring London, with no desire in my bones to leave the house yet whatsoever.
My condition, which made my skin vulnerable to even a mildly bright day, hadn’t even factored into my decision.
I had a sudden freedom available to me, and yet I’d happily settled into the comforts of Crowthorne House, indulging it, enjoying it, becoming a small part of it.
Like a mouse, I had darted out of one dark hole and taken refuge in another.
The house and everyone in it – especially Maggie, and Nicholas – offered a temporary safety and security that I had never, ever experienced in my life before.
Water came from the taps, not the frozen brook.
Electricity worked consistently. Heating came from gas fires and radiators, and bath water was piping hot the moment I drew a bath.
I had no animals to tend to, nothing to sell.
Hot breakfasts were brought to me on trays while I sat in bed, while later meals were taken in the dining room or the parlour, all together, even Maggie, like we were a family. I was rarely alone, and I was entirely protected.
I love it here, I wanted to say. The cold, spartan morgue. The quiet people laying supine. The ticking grandfather clock. The grand mahogany staircase. The tangled garden. I just love it.
“I felt the very same way when I first started working for the Crowthorne family. I felt like I’d always lived here.
Like I’d been born here,” said Maggie. “You know, I raised the two boys from when they were little dots? Alexander, when he was born – god rest his sweet soul – and Nicholas, when they took him in.”
I drew my mouth away from the rim of the cup I was sipping from and swallowed. “What do you mean, took him in?”
“Nicholas was Eliza – his adoptive mother’s – nephew. They were Catholics. Her sister had him out of wedlock, and when she died shortly after from leukaemia, Niles and Eliza adopted him as their own. He was barely three years old, while Alexander was six,” said Maggie, smiling fondly at the memory.
“Then he has a family?” I asked, puzzled. “Where are they?”
“All gone,” she said, sadly.
She sat beside me on the bed, folding her hands in her lap.
“I take it he hasn’t told you about the fire.
It took out the whole west side, and part of the kitchen, during the night.
Alexander was running the funeral business so that Niles could think about retirement.
Nicholas was a young thing, barely twenty-one, when he lost everyone.
Their rooms were on this floor. They died in their sleep. ”
Then he was alone, without another soul to call family. Like me.
“But what about you, and Nicholas?” I asked, unable to believe that a fire had ravaged this house and killed everyone in it, but for two.
“I was downstairs on the east side. When the smoke alarm woke me, the plumes were already filling the stairway. I was able to escape out the front door. Nick tried desperately to fight the flames, but he couldn’t.
He escaped onto the attic room balcony and climbed down the trellis holding up the ivy. ”
“He didn’t mention any of this,” I said.
“He’s a private man. He’ll explain it all eventually, I’m sure. I can see he’s taken a liking to you,” said Maggie, her voice tilting up towards the end of her sentence, as if asking a question. Her warm eyes watched me closely as I took another sip of my tea.
The west side of the house had to have been rebuilt, then. We were in the west side.
“What happened to this room?” I asked hesitantly.
“A blackened shell. Barely anything left. It all had to be rebuilt,” said Maggie, her lips thin and her expression tense. “It was awful, absolutely awful.”
“He did tell me about Louisa, that she died. Was it...was she in this room when it..?”
Maggie closed her eyes, saying nothing for a few moments. Her hands were flat on her thighs; deep red nails, with golden rings punctuating each finger. Gold bangles at her wrists. I wondered if they were gifts from Nicholas, thanking her year after year for her service. For her loyalty to him.
“That poor girl,” she said solemnly, shaking her head. “That poor, poor girl.”
I shook a little, the room suddenly feeling very cold, despite the central heating I had so quickly become accustomed to. I gazed about the room, the pale pink flock wallpaper, the fluffy carpet.
“Then this was all rebuilt to look exactly as it had looked when she...when the fire ripped through this side of the house?” I asked, my mouth dry. I took another sip of tea.
“That’s right,” said Maggie. “Poor Nick came inside, when it was all over, to find half a ruin, and his family....well. He tried to restore things to the way they were. Even the dolls house and the rocking horse are replicas. He was grieving. Suffice it to say, he was never the same after that.”
“I see,” I replied, glancing uneasily around the room.
It somehow looked dated and brand new all at once, like a locked showroom, left to go stale and gather dust. My eyes fell over the girlish things, reminiscent of someone much younger than Louisa would have been. A child, even.
The glass dome inside a gilded cage, where a ballerina performed her arabesque in a white tutu.
The rocking horse in the corner with its white mane and braided tail, with a peach-coloured saddle and reins.
A southern gothic dolls house beside the terrace doors, with its shutters closed, as if hiding its inhabitants from the world; all recluses like me. ..and perhaps him.
Tears rose in my eyes. These could be my things, if I’d ever had the choice. They were all things I’d seen on the TV in the pub, and in home interior magazines that I flicked through in the post office; things I’d pined for when I was little.
Nicholas had replaced everything Louisa either had or would have wanted, and kept the room just-so.
There was a distinct feeling of fate about it, as if this room had always been meant for me – not Louisa. As if Nicholas had styled it to fulfil all my private dreams of a childhood I’d never had, closed it up, and waited for me.
Like he always knew I’d be here. Like he knew me.
But of course, that couldn’t be true.
“She was very feminine, Louisa. Like a little porcelain doll. So fragile,” said Maggie, following my gaze around the room, looking at all the treasures.
“Where is she buried?” I asked.