There had been something else . . . something Ezra had said that was bothering her, but she could not pinpoint what it was. Was it during their conversation in the service station? She cast her mind back, running through everything he had said, but whatever it was, it kept slipping through her fingertips, a truth too insubstantial to catch hold of.
At last she stood, stretching her stiff limbs, the air of the room cool on her cheeks after the heat of the fire. Her case lay at the foot of the bed. In the pocket was the old tobacco tin, and she opened it and drew out her cards. Shivering a little, she cut the deck.
The card that stared up at her was the Moon, inverted.
Hal frowned. The Moon meant intuition, and trusting your intuition. It was a guiding light, but one that could be unreliable—for it was not always there, and sometimes when you needed it most, the night would be impenetrably dark.
Inverted, it meant deception, and especially self-deception. It meant the intuition that could lead you astray, down a false path.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing your own lies . . . Her mother’s voice in her ear, warning, always warning. You want to believe as much as they do.
And she did. She did want to believe. After her mother’s death, she had found herself dealing out the cards night after night, trying to make sense of it all, trying to find answers where there were none. She had spent hours poring over her mother’s cards, running her hands over them, looking for meaning.
But always that voice of skepticism in her ear, her mother’s voice: There is no meaning, apart from what you want to see, and what you are afraid of turning up.
She put her hands over her ears, as if she could shut out that voice of whispered sense and logic.
When had her mother become so cynical?
The girl in the diary, with her superstition and her obsessive reading of the cards, she was like a different person from the woman who had taken herself to the pier every day to read for fools and strangers. Tarot had been a job for Hal’s mother—nothing more. It had been something she was good at, but she had never believed, however convincing her patter was to strangers, and she had never hidden that skepticism from Hal. How had she turned from this questing, openhearted young girl into the disillusioned, weary woman Hal remembered?
They’re not magic, sweetheart, she had said to Hal once, in answer to her question. Hal could not have been more than four or five. You can play with them all you like. They’re just pretty pictures. But people like to pretend that life has . . . meaning, I suppose. It makes them feel happy, to think that they’re part of a bigger story.
Then why, Hal had asked, confused, did people come to see her every day? Why did they pay money if none of it was true? It’s like going to see a play, she had explained. People want to believe it’s true. My job is to pretend it is.
The girl in the diary had not been pretending. She had been in love—with the power of the cards, and the power of fate. She had believed. What had that changed? What had happened to make her stop believing in that power?
There is something I’m not seeing, Hal thought, and she picked up the Moon card and stared down at it, at the shadowy face in the bright orb. Something I’m missing.
But whatever it was, it lay just out of reach, and at last she put the cards away, and slid between the sheets, fully clothed, to try to sleep.
She was almost asleep, drifting in the strange no-man’s-land between waking and dreaming, the firelight making patterns on the insides of her lids, when an image came to her.
A book. A buttercup-yellow book with no lettering on the cover or spine.
It wasn’t hers, and she could not place where it had come from, and yet . . . and yet it was somehow familiar. She had seen it before. But where?
Hal sat up, feeling the chill air of the room at the back of her neck, and she pressed her fingers to her closed lids, trying to picture it, where she had seen it, why her subconscious was needling her now.
She had almost given up and was about to lie back down and put it down to a tired imagination, when something came back to her in a sudden rush. Not a picture—but a smell. The smell of dust, of cobwebs, of fraying leather. The feeling of thick, sticky plastic between her fingers. And she knew.
It had been that first morning at Trepassen. The study, frozen in time, and the book on the high shelf that she had started to look through, only to be interrupted.
The photographs. Perhaps they would show her something she was missing. Edward, maybe, as he had been as a young man. Or even her mother.
And more than the photographs—the footstep in the dust.
Someone, that very first morning at Trepassen, or perhaps a week before, had been in that study to look at the pictures. It might have been nostalgia, but Hal thought that of all the people she had ever met, the Westaways had not a bone of nostalgia in their bodies. The past for them was not a happy place, full of golden memories, but a minefield charged with pain. No—if Abel, Ezra, Harding, Edward, or any of the others had got down that album, it had been for some other, very practical reason. And suddenly Hal wanted to know that reason very much.
There was something in that album that someone had wanted to see, or check, or remove. But why?
And if she and Ezra left first thing tomorrow, she might never have another chance to find out.
Swinging her legs out of bed, Hal pulled her coat back on as some protection from the chilly night air, and shoved her bare feet back into her cold shoes. Then she pushed open the attic door, and tiptoed quietly down the stairs.
At the first landing she paused, listening, but no sound of snores reached her ears. If Ezra was asleep—and he must be, for he had looked exhausted enough to fall asleep on his feet—he was a silent sleeper.
And then she was down in the hallway, in the dark.
Hal did not dare to turn on a light, but the house was no longer the unfamiliar maze of that first morning, and she did not need one; the faint light coming in through the hall windows was enough for her to pick her way past the drawing room, past the library and the billiard room and the boot closet. She pushed through a dividing door, and there on her left was the breakfast room, the dirty dishes still laid out on the table. The sight made Hal stop in her tracks—had Mrs. Warren done anything since they left? But she could not stop now to wonder about that.
The next part was the most dangerous, for it took her right past Mrs. Warren’s sitting room, and Hal had no idea where she slept. If she slept. Somehow she would not have put it past her to be still awake at midnight, rocking in her chair in front of the hissing fire.
The stone floor of the orangery was cold, and too noisy to risk. However, there was no way round it—it was the only route to the study, or the only one Hal knew, at least. In the end, she bent and took off her shoes, tiptoeing across the frosty flags, wincing at the chill striking up into her bare soles.
And then she was through, and in the little vestibule on the far side, and her hand was on the study door.
? ? ?
WHEN SHE ENTERED THE STUDY, Hal had, for the second time, the strangest sense of having stepped back in time. The dust of years was soft beneath her feet as she stepped across the fraying carpet, the only resistance the minute crunch of small insects or gusted leaves, crushed beneath her toes.
The room was shrouded in darkness, and Hal had no choice but to fumble for the switch of the green-shaded desk lamp. It was very old, the cord fraying and fabric-covered, prewar at the least, she thought, but when she found the brass switch and clicked it, it came on without protest, illuminating the room in a soft, verdant glow.
There were the steps, untouched since her last visit, the footprint upon them clearly visible. And there, at the top, was the book she had hurriedly replaced, still sticking out at a very slight angle into the room.
Her heart beating in her mouth, Hal set her foot onto the library steps, in the footprint of that other person, and stepped up, up, and up once again, until her hand closed on the soft yellow spine, and she slid the book out into her waiting arms.