The House on the Hill #3
It didn’t occur to her not to go in. She took a step towards the front door, then another. When she tried the handle, it swung open to reveal red and grey tiles on the floor and a staircase straight ahead.
‘Is there anybody here?’
No one answered. She hesitated a moment more, then stepped into the entrance hall with its stone fireplace and marble mantel. She heard the ticking of the grandmother clock and, though there was no sign of him or anyone else, Daphne knew she wasn’t alone.
‘Where are you?’
Then, on the floor above, she heard a sound.
A thud, like a piece of furniture falling over.
And, in that moment between one beat of her heart and the next, she understood.
Drawn inexorably now, Daphne went to the stairs and walked slowly up, heading towards the room on the first floor where that solitary flame still burnt.
At the top, she turned right and looked at the study door.
It was ajar. Daphne carried on, one step further, another and another.
Now the flat of her hand was on the wooden panel, pushing it wide open.
Knowing – fearing – what she was going to see.
A low armchair and brass table to her left, the folded letter there and the candle.
Ahead, the chair kicked away from the desk.
The photograph with her image in the tortoiseshell frame.
She could feel there was someone in the room with her.
Slowly, she turned and saw the image that had haunted her for five years.
Slowly, she raised her eyes and forced herself to see now, in this house on the hill, what she had never seen in life.
Feet swinging in the air, hands limp and lifeless by his side, a man hanging, twisting in the still air.
‘No . . .’
Daphne clamped her hand to her mouth to stop herself from screaming.
She couldn’t know whether he was a ghost or an imprint left in time, only that it was Douglas – her Douglas – just as he had been found, in the study of his parents’ house, five years ago.
Douglas, who had promised to look after her, but who had been unable to live with his nightmares of gas and barbed wire and his friends lying dead in the trenches.
Leaving a letter saying he didn’t want to be a burden, certain that she’d be better off without him, Douglas had left her to cope alone.
But now, as she forced herself to look on his beloved, lifeless face, she saw a kind of peace.
Finally, Daphne understood. He had been unable to save himself, but he had saved her.
She had blamed him for leaving her. Been angry with him.
Now the time had come to grieve. She could miss him and mourn the loss of their shared life together, but then set her eyes to the future.
The tears began to fall.
They found her hours later, still dazed. Appearing, as Teddy put it later, like a wraith out of the mist. Cold, rather disorientated, but otherwise all right.
It turned out Daphne had been extremely lucky.
There had been some kind of electrical short circuit in the south wing.
The wiring in the top corridor had blown and the sparks had set fire to the doll’s house and taken hold.
The old summer curtains and brocade stored on the wooden slatted shelves in the housekeeper’s room had caught next and burnt like paper and tinder, cutting off Daphne’s room from the rest of the house.
She wouldn’t have stood a chance. She would have been overcome by smoke long before the fire had reached her.
The gardener had tried to get a ladder up to her window, but been beaten back by the flames.
They’d called out and shouted, but when she hadn’t answered, they’d feared the worst. It was only as dawn broke and Daphne appeared from the direction of the park, they realised she hadn’t been in her room at all.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Teddy had said, ‘is what the hell you were doing out in the gardens in the middle of the night anyway.’
Daphne tried to explain how she had seen a light burning in the house on the hill, about the man she had followed away from the Hall, but Teddy shook his head.
There was no other house on the estate – he had asked around – just workmen’s cottages, certainly nothing grand.
As for the doll’s house, it had been bought by the current owners from a Belgian dealer.
It wasn’t connected with Dean Hall at all.
And then he patted her hand and, though everyone smiled and said how lucky she’d been, Daphne could see they thought she was in shock. That she was imagining things. The pity in their eyes burned her and she fell silent and turned away.
But Daphne knew. She knew, now, what had happened.
Later, as she rested on the sofa in the Oak Hall – having accepted Teddy’s invitation to stay at Dean Hall as long as she liked, until she felt well enough to go back to London – Daphne began to plan.
How she would leave Berwick Street and return to the little house in Chelsea she’d abandoned after Douglas’s death.
Now it was up to her.
Next year, would be better. It was time to begin again.