Chapter Seventeen
If she was going to do this – if she was going to try – then she needed to believe in it again. She needed to find the quiet surety that’d existed within her once – and capture it. Keep it.
And though Ava hated to admit it, the darkness of the parlour – the horrible cardboard upon the windows – would help.
Sitting here felt a little like that moment on stage, when the curtains were still drawn, and she waited in the shadows behind them, her breath a jagged rhythm in her throat.
Now the only light in the room came from the kerosene lamps she’d dotted upon the mantlepiece, the windowsill, the cabinets, shadowing all of the things that could draw her eye, that could distract her, and leaving her instead with only four little pools of golden light.
She pulled the little black bag towards her, reaching inside for the metronome.
The key wasn’t in the lock, and she had to pat the bottom of the leather to find it, turning it twice until the clockwork began to whir to life.
Until the arm began its measured ticking – back and forth, back and forth – and she let her eyes follow it.
Let herself focus on the rhythm of it, each tick a breath.
The bell. The watch. The penny.
She took them each out – one by one – fingers tracing the burnished metal.
The bell had been her grandmother’s – the one she’d broken one summer by accidentally snapping off the clapper when they’d gone to visit at her grand old house in Crosby.
The pocketwatch had been her mother’s – brass, although Ava always thought it looked more like gold – with delicate leaves engraved upon the hunter case.
She let her eyes wander to the clock upon the mantlepiece – for the pocketwatch was long dead, forever frozen at five minutes to twelve.
For a moment she wondered if that clock hadn’t been wound either, for it showed the same time.
And then the minute hand shuddered closer to twelve o’clock, and she heard the tentative knock at the front door.
Mr Carter was here.
And she would have to keep her promise to him, to herself. She would have to try.
It was a larger house on the inside than Damien had imagined.
From the street it had looked like one of the two-up, two-down houses that he’d shared in London – cramped into the front bedroom with five other men.
But here the squat square of a hallway extended past the stairs, disappearing into a doorway at the very end.
The walls were painted, shades of blue and green, sun-bleached, except for a few squares dotted up the staircase – the places where paintings might’ve hung once, though they didn’t anymore.
‘This way,’ said Ava, leading him through a set of double doors and into a dark but cosy parlour. There were flickering lamps everywhere – though she hadn’t lit the fire – and they cast an unsteady glow upon the mustard-yellow settee, the mismatched armchair, the fraying blue rug beneath them all.
This looked like a home well lived-in. Well loved.
If you discounted the cardboard blocking the light from the windows.
‘Sit anywhere you’d like,’ said Ava, stepping past him to twitch the curtain closed over the last glimmer of light seeping in through the edges.
‘Is this all part of it?’ Damien asked – hovering by the mantlepiece, his gaze captured by the portrait hanging above it. A man sat in the centre, a boy at his shoulder, and though Damien could spy Ava’s white-blonde hair easily enough, now it was shared by another woman. ‘The darkness? The lamps?’
‘For now, yes,’ Ava said.
He peered a little closer. ‘I rather like the dark,’ Damien mused, wondering where the ticking was coming from – for it wasn’t the clock on the mantlepiece.
‘No one likes the dark,’ said Ava.
‘I do,’ he said, quietly. ‘This woman in the picture … is it your mother?’
Unlike the rest of them, the woman was beaming, and it didn’t look like the forced sort of smile that one often saw in portraits – for the sitter had to be utterly still, and certainly not blink at the great, bloody flash of the photography bulb. It was a true smile. A gleeful smile.
Which made the sombre expressions of the rest of them seem so out of place.
Ava’s mouth became a line, but she turned her head nonetheless, following his gaze above the fireplace. ‘Yes,’ she said.
He leaned a little closer, the edge of his lips tweaking upwards. ‘You look alike, you know.’
She came to stand beside him. She was almost a full head shorter than him, and where he hunched to study the picture, she lifted her chin. ‘That’s where the similarities end, I fear.’
He risked a sideways glance at her, but her expression was unreadable. Smooth as marble. ‘What was she like?’
‘Strict,’ she said. ‘But reasonable with it. Calm. Nothing stirred her. Nothing fazed her.’
‘Nothing?’ Damien asked, looking closer at the picture. She didn’t look like a woman untouched by the world around her. She looked like a woman who glowed with it, who mirrored it, and reflected it back.
‘Do you want to sit down?’
Ava gestured behind him, and he turned – and hesitated.
She had pulled the mustard armchair so close to the settee that they would be knee to knee – with nothing to separate them.
It was an oddly intimate set-up, and it made a different kind of something fizz in his stomach as he pulled off his coat, and slung it across the arm of the sofa.
She sat in the chair opposite him, close enough that he could count the pale indentations in her skin – pock marks from childhood, perhaps – and see that a strand of white-blonde hair had fastened itself to one of her eyelashes.
‘We’ll start with something easy,’ she said, her voice softening a little. ‘Your childhood.’
Something twisted in his stomach. ‘My childhood? Why?’
‘Childhood memories are powerful,’ said Ava. ‘Unlocking them can often be the key to other memories, and so they are a good place to start. A safe place to start.’
This felt anything but safe. Everything in his body was telling him to run – though he only reached to grip the cushioned arm of the settee, squeezing and squeezing until it hurt his fingers.
‘The first thing I shall do is try and get you to relax.’
‘I am relaxed,’ said Damien, even as he listened to the uneven th-thump of his own heart – in time with the incessant ticking of the metronome.
‘You are fidgeting,’ said Ava. ‘It’s perfectly normal. Everyone fidgets when they are nervous.’
His gaze flicked to her hands – to the fingernail dragging back and forth, rhythmically, over the pad of her thumb. ‘Then that makes two of us,’ he said.
Ava looked down, and curled both hands into tight fists. ‘I haven’t tried to do this in a long time,’ she said quietly.
‘If it helps, I’ll no doubt be relieved if you fail.’
Her lips twitched upwards slightly. ‘I don’t believe that does help, no.’ She looked back at her hands, and then held one out between them.
‘Give me your wrist,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Damien automatically, the word from his mouth before he’d really registered what she was asking. ‘Why?’
‘I want to show you something.’
Her hand still hovered between them, and Damien looked down at his gloved hand. He didn’t want to remove the glove, but he rolled it back a little, and proffered his wrist.
She pressed two fingers to his skin, pushing down at the delicate tangle of blue veins.
‘Can you feel that?’
He could feel the gentle pressure of her fingertips against his wrist. Could feel the warmth where their skin brushed.
But the oddest thing of all was the constricting feeling in his throat.
‘Breathe for me,’ she said, her voice so soft it was like a caress. ‘Just breathe, deep breaths. In and out.’
Damien wanted to snatch his hand away, and yet he was anchored. Held in place by the gentle press of her fingertips against his wrist, the soothing pressure of her touch.
‘Breathe,’ she whispered.
And he did. He pulled a deep breath into his lungs, let his chest swell with it.
‘There,’ she said, relinquishing her grip. ‘Much better.’
She reached down for the small, clasped bag at her feet.
‘Choose one,’ she said, opening her palms to him. There was a silver penny with a hole chiselled through it, a golden pocketwatch attached to a silver chain, and a bell in the shape of a woman. Wide skirts made up the bell’s waist, her arms firmly positioned upon her hips to form the yoke.
‘The watch,’ he said, his voice oddly taut, for the lump still sat in his throat, no matter how much he swallowed. All because he was nervous?
‘Focus, please,’ said Ava, her voice softer now. ‘Upon the watch.’
When she moved it back and forth he saw that the face of it was cracked, the hands frozen in time.
‘Rather pretty,’ he said, trying to wrangle back control, and yet hearing how odd and strangled his voice was. ‘Brass, though – is it not?’
Her gaze flicked to his. ‘Focus on the colour of it. The shine of it. Let your eyes blur away the details.’
Damien frowned, and cleared his throat. ‘So focus on the pocketwatch … but not too intently?’
She nodded, her tone still gentle, still soft. ‘And it’s better if you remain quiet.’
‘Is it?’
‘For this part, at least.’
Damien swallowed once more, relieved to find some of the pressure had released.
She was moving the watch slowly back and forth, like a pendulum, and though he tried to tell his mind to look at it, to see it, his gaze kept slipping elsewhere.
To the delicate bend in her wrist, or the loose, yellow threads of the armchair she sat upon.
‘How will we know if this works?’ he said, his voice softer this time.
‘You’ll fall asleep.’
‘I don’t feel tired.’
He watched the firelight bounce off the burnished brass, turning it to copper, and then gold, and back again. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
There was a slight stutter in the pendulum swing. ‘Then apparently, you shall be relieved. And I’ll at least have an answer.’
‘To what?’
‘Focus on the watch, please Mr Carter.’
‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Call me Damien.’
‘Very well. Focus on the watch please, Damien. And try and believe, if only for a moment, that this might work.’
Damien’s gaze slid back. There was a roiling in his stomach that hadn’t been there before, pitching and churning in time to each swing of it, and it made a rash of sweat spring to his face.
He had spent so many years not knowing. Assuming. But what if he remembered … and it was worse? What if it was worse than he told himself, even in his darkest moments?
‘Now I am going to count down from ten,’ said Ava, her voice soft as his eyes tracked the watch back and forth, back and forth.
‘And when I get to one, you are going to fall asleep. It is not a true sleep, for your mind will still speak to you, but now it will be able to say things it can only say when you dream. It will show you things it does not show you during your waking moments.’
Damien thought that that was likely a pile of utter tosh, and yet when he opened his mouth to tell her so, he found his words came out as a gentle sigh instead.