Chapter Twenty-One

Present

Tegan plucked up courage a few days after her conversation with Merryn to go into the ballroom and locate the picture of Viola.

First of all, she had to go and congratulate her sister on the birth of her daughter, Rosie Loveday Penhaligon. That had happened on 30 September, and, once the excitement had died down a little and their parents had been and visited, she felt she could focus a little more on her job. She also realised with a start that if she and Ryan were to do something for Halloween, to tie in with the pumpkin trail, that they really needed to get a wiggle on.

They’d exchanged a few emails; he’d passed on the details of a seamstress in Covent Garden and Tegan had sent her the photos and sketches they’d collected. Ianthe Shelley — what a fantastic name — had promised she could work her magic and recreate the dress. And even though Tegan was secretly disappointed that Elsie’s dress had either not survived the years or been lost to the family — Elsie’s children had, she knew, scattered around the globe — she immediately trusted Ianthe to do her very best with what she had.

And as well as that, she knew that Ryan was looking for artefacts in the archives to help with the Snow Queen exhibition, and, in the meantime, she’d ordered some huge glass floor tiles to make a frozen lake and some frond-y stuff to decorate it all with.

She thought back to when she and Ryan had started discussing the event and that he had suggested a sleigh, but, realistically, she thought that might be pushing both the budget and the fact that a huge thing like that would need to be brought inside that old house. Nope. Not a good idea.

The only thing that hovered over her was the location of Viola’s picture. Something was stopping her from searching for it — probably the same feelings that she had harboured when she’d thought that the girl in the sketch might be the same one who had approached her in the office that time. The thought still made her shudder and she had avoided wandering around Pencradoc after hours in case the couple — because now she was convinced they were a couple — appeared again.

But today — today, she felt as if she needed to go and hunt for it. Something was just pushing her to do it. She found it difficult to concentrate on much else. There was something knocking in the back of her mind anyway which was unsettling her. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she knew if she kept busy, her subconscious mind might just figure it out.

She made it to six thirty, well after closing time at the arts centre, and well after she should have left herself — but she didn’t relish the thought of a long Friday evening stretching out in front of her, alone with her thoughts in her room at Pencradoc House. She hadn’t even had Coren to distract her with his gentle demands this afternoon. He had been off to meet someone about the wedding packages they wanted to offer and then he was coming back to spend the weekend with Sybill.

But, now, she really had no more excuses to stay at her desk, stuck there like a limpet.

Go find it! She imagined the New York voice was speaking in her ear. Or, at least, she thought, as she sipped a cup of strong, black coffee while staring into space (well, staring at the corner that apparition had appeared from), she was imagining it.

Ugh.

‘Right. I’m going,’ she said out loud. She stood up and glared at the corner of the room. God knew how she was actually working in that room. She texted Coren, just to say she was finally finishing up for the day and would be heading to the ballroom for one final task, in case he checked in on her, then, still looking at her phone, she realised she couldn’t resist texting Merryn.

How haunted is the ballroom at Pencradoc? she typed out. She suspected Merryn would take a while to respond, probably being knee-deep in bottles and nappies and things. But, to her surprise, Merryn typed back almost immediately.

Haven’t seen anything there myself! came the response. Not to say there isn’t anything there, though.

Ugh.

Why ugh?

I have to go there and look for Viola.

Haven’t you done that yet?

Why aren’t you with your child? Tegan pulled a face — guilt-tripping her sister maybe wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but the texts were implying there may actually be a ghost there.

She’s sleeping — SLEEPING, THANK GOD . . .

Tegan grinned. Okay. Give her cuddles from me and I’ll report back.

Will do. And you make sure you do! xxx

xxx

Tegan took a deep breath and walked out of the office. It was one step after another, that’s all it was. She went along the corridor, along the hallway, through the drawing room. There wasn’t a soul around — a living soul, anyway. Her heart pounding, she kept walking, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead.

The house was — she could feel it — taking on a different personality. It was almost waking up around her, all these silent rooms, filled with modern-day things, but she could swear that as she walked through, everything was changing behind her, ironically taking on new shapes of the old things that used to be there.

Oh, shit. Maybe this hadn’t been a good idea at all.

She didn’t feel like it was polite anymore to challenge the house on the existence of its ghosts . . .

All she wanted to do was keep going forwards — she was, literally, too scared to go backwards and retrace her steps. She was terrified at what she might see, but she was also terrified of what she was leaving behind.

Forcing herself to keep going, she walked through the door into the ballroom, trying to imagine it decorated for the Snow Queen event, leading into the morning room behind. None of the pictures on the walls would be removed, but instead she would have frosty trees and blue-and-silver stuff going on — maybe some classical Christmas music or carols from a church choir singing . . .

Yes, that was nice. That was a nice thing for her to imagine — not to imagine the ghostly figures she felt were filling the room around her. Laughing children, couples dancing and residents from centuries ago walking purposefully through the room . . .

She whimpered. ‘Oh God. Please be pretty close Viola’s picture, please be pretty close . . .’

She stopped suddenly and looked to her left. Later, she would kid herself that she had caught sight of the sketch out of her peripheral vision, but, in reality, she knew that something or someone had made her stop in that exact spot and look at the wall.

The picture she found herself staring at was relatively small — no bigger than A4 sized, but beautifully framed in a simple gold rectangle. It was, as Merryn had said, a charcoal sketch that looked as if it had been swiftly transferred onto the paper, hugely informal, with the sitter looking off to the right and laughing.

That’s right, she thought . Marigold was there, asking so prettily for a buttered crumpet. I wasn’t sure what Elsie was sketching, until I saw it here, so long afterwards . . .

‘Woah. Stop it!’ said Tegan, batting the thoughts back from whence they came. Or were they thoughts? Were they actual memories? She felt, for an odd moment, as if she was actually there, in a cluttered, friendly drawing room in London, surrounded by someone else’s possessions, and definitely in someone else’s life.

But still she found herself staring at the picture as if she knew the girl in it so very, very well, unable to tear herself away from it, lost somewhere between two worlds. It really didn’t help that the longer she looked at it, the more it seemed that she was looking into a mirror; that the girl in the sketch was her. Tegan, in another time and another place.

It was also clear, comparing this sketch to the photograph of the wedding that Viola was the small, fair-haired girl she had suspected she was. And, Tegan realised with a shudder, the person who had appeared to her in the office with that bouquet of flowers held in front of her.

In fact, she could smell it now — that odd, green scent of Christmas foliage. Holly and ivy and mistletoe, fresh from the woods. It was wrapping itself around her and she genuinely thought she would either throw up or pass out.

What the hell was going on?

‘Oh, God,’ she muttered again. Realistically, she knew that ghosts couldn’t harm her, but also, she seemed rooted to the spot. She was also conscious that, outside, the sky was seemingly growing darker with the promise of heavy rain and everything just seemed ominous. Like a classic haunted-house movie. And here she was, in a haunted ballroom, looking at a picture she seemed to remember being created.

Then the door flung open with a bang and she heard footsteps at the other end of the room hurrying towards her, and she screamed.

* * *

Ryan had already found a few items in the archives at Wheal Mount. He knew that they needed to get the Halloween things ready and then, once that was done, he would see what he could find for Christmas. There were bound to be Christmas cards, or invitations, or, hopefully, photographs.

He just needed to go through Tammy and Bryony’s system logically. Logic didn’t come easily to Ryan — he was much more of a creative thinker. So, yes, the job he had found himself in was challenging at times, but extremely interesting. Nothing, though, had been as weird to come by as the story he had found in that chimney breast. He didn’t want to dwell on it too much and even now was starting to think of it as some kind of dream.

But to his delight, he had found a load of spooky things in a large hatbox. Bryony’s logic had, indeed, extended to “H/P” for “Halloween/Pencradoc” and he sent a silent thank you to her for being as absolutely descriptive as he would have been in that case. The box contained a pair of dress-up black velvet cat ears attached to some ribbon, a long, black velvet tail and a stiff little black skirt. Also, there had been a pointed hat, rather battered now, and a silver rope, still loosely knotted. A random, ornately decorated hand mirror and, oddly, a white sheet that looked too small for a person, but had ties attached to it too.

The mystery was solved when, at the bottom of that box, he found a photo album with a collection of pictures in. Entranced, he sat down on another trunk and carefully flicked through it. Halloween party, 1911 , it proclaimed on the first page.

‘Yes!’ He almost punched the air. The year and the event matched with the invite they had. And, to make it even better, the book was full of photos of the party. The first picture was of a little girl dressed as a cat, making a claw shape with her hands. In another photograph she was sitting on the floor, her arms around the neck of a dog, which was dressed in the small white sheet.

Three women, dressed as witches, posed theatrically around a giant cooking pot that was supposed to be, he guessed, a cauldron — one of the women wore the pointed hat and what looked like the silver rope belt. Other people took their turns in the photos and he smiled at the younger boys who he could tell were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

The background to all the photographs was a depiction of Pencradoc House itself, made to look scary and forbidding, placed in what was supposed to be a haunted forest judging by the ghosts and ghouls peering out from behind trees. There were even figures at the windows of the house itself. Ryan suspected it had taken a good deal of time and skill to do that, and wondered which of the family had been involved.

The girls. Always the girls . . . came a voice so close to him that he jerked his head around to see who had crept up into the attics with him, dropping the album in his fluster. There was nobody there, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching him and enjoying reminiscing over the photographs as he turned the pages.

Ryan shivered and picked up the album. It had landed face down and as he picked it up, he saw that it had opened at a page he hadn’t seen yet. On one side of the book was a photograph of a petite, fair-haired woman dressed as a vampiress apparently. She again was doing the claw-thing with her hands and baring her teeth. Her hair was messy and back-combed or something as it stood out around her head like a dandelion-clock, with some curls hanging down over her shoulder. She was, however, he could tell, desperately trying not to laugh.

Ryan stared at the picture for what seemed like an age. It was almost as if he had seen her first hand — almost as if he knew exactly what that girl’s laughter sounded like, even what perfume she had been wearing that night. Something like violets and lilies.

He blinked and pulled his thoughts away from it, forcing himself to look at the opposite page. He went hot and cold as he looked. A young, dark-haired man glowered out at the lens, almost as if he was reluctant to stand there and have his picture taken. He was tall, slim and slightly hunched over as if someone had told him to pose like a tortured Romantic poet. One hand was on the back of a chair and the other was on his hip, his legs crossed at the ankles as he stood there. His clothes were a raggedy version of Byron or Keats or Shelley, but the most astonishing thing was his expression. Ryan knew that expression well. It was exactly the same as the one he himself used when he was grumpy and cross and just wanted to be left alone.

Bloody awful night, that . . . she looked top-hole, though, don’t you think?

The voice interrupted his thoughts again and Ryan closed the book rapidly. Something slid out of it and he picked it up. It was another photograph, but this time of the same young man in an army uniform. His hair was shorter and parted at the side, and he looked even more like Ryan in this one, although, bizarrely, the scowl had gone and he was almost smiling.

Ryan’s stomach turned over as he flipped the photo and read the words on the back.

Laurie, 1914 , it read.

And at that point, Ryan tossed everything back in the hatbox, picked it up and left the attic just as fast as he could.

Had it been up to him, he would have left the damned hatbox up there, but he knew that box of treasures was what he needed to take to Pencradoc and, if he left it there, he would have to pluck up a lot of courage to go back and retrieve it.

Better to just — do it.

But even as he reached the safety of his office, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had accompanied him all the way downstairs.