The Mercer's House (Northern Gothic Book 1) (7 page)

‘I told you it was dangerous,’ said Will, and she gave him a look.

‘In fact, the ghost of Sarah Humble—if indeed it exists—is meant to haunt the beach down there, close to the rocks,’ said Alexander. ‘People have reported hearing a woman’s voice. They never hear the words, but they all say that it sounds like it’s begging or pleading, and sometimes even screaming. Sometimes there’s more than one voice. I’ve never heard them myself, and I’m a little sceptical about the existence of ghosts, but we do hear these reports now and again.’

Zanna thought of the voices she had heard in the water and on the rocks, but said nothing.

‘Now, I have something to show you,’ went on Alexander. ‘Come downstairs.’

They followed him down the staircase to the living-room, where he went across to a wooden display cabinet and brought something out. It was an antique rifle.

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it magnificent? Look at the engraving on the barrel. And the grain of the wood. It’s a simply splendid piece. Quite unlike modern guns, which are all plain and functional. This is a work of art.’

‘What is it?’ said Zanna. ‘I mean, I know what it is, obviously, but is it—?’

‘This is thought to be the very gun with which Jonas Humble shot his wife’s lover and drove her to drown herself,’ said Alexander in some satisfaction. ‘Can’t you picture the scene?’ He levelled the gun at Zanna, who backed away slightly and regarded it warily. ‘Oh, don’t worry—it’s not loaded,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The police wouldn’t let me keep it if it were. It’s an old flintlock, and I don’t suppose you can even get ammunition for it nowadays. Here—take a closer look. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

Zanna took it and examined it briefly, then handed it back with a little shiver.

‘Not keen, are you?’ said Will, and she wrinkled her nose.

‘It’s a—not a very nice story,’ she said. She had been going to say ‘horrible,’ but Alexander clearly relished it so much that she didn’t want to sound rude.

‘No,’ agreed Will. ‘Dad loves all that stuff, though. He’s a bit ghoulish like that.’

‘I confess I do find it extraordinarily fascinating,’ said Alexander. ‘The lives and loves of our ancestors never fail to interest me. It’s the human aspect, you see. People live so differently now from how they did then, and yet their basic motivations never change. We humans are essentially the same now as we were hundreds, even thousands of years ago. We’re driven by the same wants and needs as ever: hunger, ambition, greed, desire, jealousy—love, of course. Perhaps that’s what those who report the voices are hearing: the echoes of past emotions. Some people are more sensitive to that kind of thing than others.’

Zanna shivered again.

‘Let’s go back outside,’ said Will.

‘T
ELL US about Helen,’ said Alexander, once they had returned to the garden. ‘What do you know about her? I realize that’s an odd question to ask about one’s wife, of course.’

Zanna took a sip of wine to dispel the chill that had spread through her body after the story she had just heard, and wondered how much to say.

‘I don’t know a lot,’ she said at last. ‘My dad never mentioned her until just before he died. He said they’d never had much in common. He was a solicitor, very strait-laced, and she was a free-spirited type. I think she probably irritated him. He was the sort of person who hated to see a thing out of place.’

‘Yes, I can see why she would annoy him, in that case,’ said Alexander. ‘Helen wasn’t the tidy sort. Her mind was always elsewhere, I think. The artistic temperament, I suppose you’d call it.’

‘She had paint under her fingernails, like you,’ said Corbin suddenly.

Zanna glanced at her hands.

‘I’m not very tidy either,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s the artistic temperament in my case, though—just laziness.’

Corbin gave a lop-sided smile. Zanna could sense Will looking at her again, but would not turn her head to meet his eye, and instead concentrated on trying not to feel self-conscious. She took another sip of wine. The glass had been sitting in the sun while they had been indoors, and it was warm.

‘Didn’t Helen say anything at all to you about her family?’ she said after a moment.

Alexander looked uncomfortable.

‘She wouldn’t tell me anything about them,’ he said. ‘She said she’d come up here to escape them.’ He hesitated, then said apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I rather got the impression they’d been abusive.’

‘Her parents?’ said Zanna.

‘Everyone, I think,’ said Alexander.

The only other person in the family had been Jonathan, Zanna’s father. So Helen had hinted that her family had harmed her, had she? That squared with what Zanna had been told, and it explained why Alexander had never pressed her for more information. He must have thought it would upset her. He had probably assumed she would open up to him in her own time, but it sounded as if she never had.

‘My grandparents died before I was born,’ said Zanna. ‘I take it Helen didn’t give any further details?’

‘She used to say they’d kill her if they found her, but I rather took that as an exaggeration,’ said Alexander. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry to talk about your family like that. Perhaps it’s best if we don’t talk about it any more. I dare say she only said it for effect.’

But Zanna knew Helen had not said it for effect.

‘Were you surprised when she left?’ she said. Again she was treading on personal ground. Despite her family connection with the Devereuxes, she had to remember that she hardly knew these people.

‘Why, yes, I was,’ replied Alexander. ‘At least, perhaps not at her running off, but at the fact that she took Rowan and never got in touch.’

‘I wonder whether she was depressed,’ said Zanna carefully. ‘Depressed people don’t always act sensibly.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Alexander, his head on one side. ‘We already know she liked to keep secrets, so I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turned out she’d been feeling down and not told anyone. Happy people don’t tend to run away, I suppose.’

He might have been considering the political decisions of a long-dead king rather than the disappearance of his wife and stepson, for all the grief he showed. Or so Zanna thought, until she noticed that Corbin was looking at him with something like sympathy, from what she could tell through his frozen features. Perhaps he could read emotions in his twin brother that she could not see.

Will, meanwhile, was looking at Corbin. His face, which had before seemed almost friendly, again wore that closed expression. Zanna wondered what they were all feeling. She longed to ask about Rowan, and whether they missed him, but she had no idea how to introduce the subject. They were all so determined to move on with their lives, so determined to ignore the enormity of the hole which had been torn in their family twenty-five years ago, that it seemed the height of bad taste even to mention the little boy who had been taken away by his mother, never to be seen again.

So Helen had accused her parents of wishing to harm her, had she? They’d died a year or two after Helen had run off, so if there had been any danger from them it had long passed. And whether or not her brother had hurt her, there was no denying that he’d abandoned her to her own devices after their quarrel. Had he not been so implacable he might have found her long ago; instead he had left it to his daughter to track her down, by which time it was far too late to make it up—Helen was long gone, and might never be found again.

It was just before seven o’clock when Zanna returned to the Coach and Horses, via the High Street rather than the beach this time. She had excused herself as soon as she saw that Corbin was becoming tired, although it was clear that Alexander would happily have kept his guest there all evening. She had left with a promise to stay at least until Friday, when she was to have lunch with Will’s partner Lou, who wanted to discuss her paintings. In the meantime, she would go and visit Alison Maudsley and see if she could find out any more information about Helen.

It was getting towards dusk, but the evening was pleasant with the residual heat of the day, and Zanna was in no hurry. She walked slowly along the High Street, her head still buzzing slightly from the wine, looking in the windows of the various shops selling nautical striped cushions and driftwood ornaments. She was admiring a large mirror with a white-painted frame when she felt her phone vibrate in her bag, and took it out to check it. There was nothing but a single email, with the subject heading ‘Helen Chambers.’ Perhaps Alexander had remembered something he wanted to tell her. Zanna opened the email, then frowned in puzzlement, because the message contained only three words. She stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending, until it dawned on her that what she had thought was the subject heading was not that at all; it was the name of the sender. The email had been sent by a Helen Chambers. There was no photo, but the name was clear enough. Was it a joke of some sort? Zanna read the message again, and the words stood out in their stark simplicity:

I am waiting.

3rd April, 1989

7
PM
: I’ve spent all day waiting, it seems. First there was the woman at the surgery who didn’t believe that Rowan had an earache, and kept us sitting for an hour until we finally got to see the doctor. Then there was a queue in the post office. And now Alex, who just called to say he won’t make it home in time for dinner, and not to wait, even though it was ready half an hour ago.

Still, I managed to do some painting today. The weather has been so unseasonably warm for Easter, and we get this sort of sunshine so infrequently this far north, that I couldn’t wait to take the opportunity. It was such a relief, as despite all my fine resolutions at Christmas I hadn’t done anything, but today the light was so perfect and all the colours so vivid that I couldn’t resist, and I insisted the boys come with me to the beach. I wanted to paint them, but they wouldn’t sit still, so I did a study of the seagulls on the rocks instead. I was feeling so cheerful that I thought the painting would come out well, but now that I look at it, I see something grim, something dangerous, has crept into it, as it always does. The rocks look squat and black, like toads, while the seagulls’ eyes speak of evil and their beaks are as sharp as knives. I know what it is—it’s that dark place in my mind, that dark place which will never let me produce a truly happy picture, which always reminds me of what I am and how I can never be like anybody else. I won’t keep the painting—seeing a reflection of my mind in my work upsets me too much—but perhaps I’ll give it another try tomorrow. I can only keep trying. One day perhaps I can reach that happy place and produce something I’ll be satisfied with. But for now, I have to accept that I’m tainted by my past, and that it will always show.

10 pm: Alex still hasn’t come home. The boys are in bed and Corbin has gone out somewhere, so I’m here alone. I’ve spent half the evening wondering whether I ought to write down the other thing that happened today, and I still don’t know the answer, so I’m letting my pen run on and do what it will—I won’t make a conscious decision.

Why did I say ‘do what it will’ instead of ‘do what it wants?’ That’s obvious enough: the word ‘Will’ is on my mind. I’ve tried to like Will, really I have. It’s not his fault that his parents couldn’t live with each other, or that his father fell in love with me. But I’ve always sensed hostility from him, and even though I try as hard as I can not to treat him any differently from Rowan, he’s always been jealous. And today I found out that it goes even further than that. I don’t quite know how to explain what happened, but the boys were playing on the beach while I was painting, when I suddenly had the oddest feeling that someone was telling me to turn around and look at them, so I did, and was just in time to catch Will giving Rowan a hard shove, with a look of hatred on his face. I was just about to tell him off, when he turned to me and it happened. The sound of the sea faded out, and was replaced by a sort of crackling and a high-pitched whine in my ears. And then I heard the voice. Will’s mouth wasn’t moving and the voice didn’t sound like his—it was deep and rasping and cruel—but I knew it was coming from inside him. Rowan and I weren’t safe, he said, and if we knew what was good for us we’d get away. I swear my blood ran cold when I heard it. Then it was as if someone flicked a switch, and we were back on the beach, and the tide was coming in, and Will was muttering an apology, and it was just like it had never happened.