But Lucy had understood quite a lot because when she was small people had still talked about Lucretia. Sometimes they called her ‘that woman’, and used words like ‘disgrace’ and ‘immoral’. Once, in Lucy’s hearing, a woman with a pinched-up mouth like Lucy’s drawstring gym-bag had said Lucretia had been lucky not to be executed for treason, and she did not care who heard her say so. Lucy thought treason had something to do with people being shut away in the Tower of London, and then being burned alive or having all their insides cut out, which would be pretty gross either way and not something you would want done to your grandmother.
The boxes and the tea-chests had ended up in the attics, which was where Mariana said you put such fusty old things: she did not want them littering up her nice rooms! Oh, nonsense, the attic stairs were not all that narrow; it was simply a matter of manoeuvring the boxes around the little twisty part to the second floor. Perfectly accessible, and also splendid for make-believe games – for Lucy and for Edmund when he came to stay in the holidays. Poorest Edmund, stuck in that house with that dreary old father. The two of them must make a search for old costumes next time; they might organize some games of charades this Christmas, said Mariana.
After Lucy’s parents died she had made a private vow never to forget them; to always remember what they looked like and how their voices sounded. But the memories had grown dim and vague with the years – she could remember a lot of laughter, sometimes a bit too shrill, and a lot of vividly dressed people sipping drinks in the evenings and at weekends – but at this distance it all seemed rather unreal and two-dimensional: like watching figures on a stage. It was ironic that the attic memories – the fragments of Lucretia’s life – had stayed with her far more vividly than the memories of her parents.
But the greater irony was that if only those stored-away memories – those crammed-full boxes and those too-heavy-to-move tea-chests – had been available now, Lucy could have plundered them for clues to Alraune. She frowned and pushed this thought away, because the memory of when and how those brittle pages and those stacks of smudgy newsprint had been lost was one of the dangerous memories. One of the bits of the past that should be left to die.
And she thought that even if she had been able to find anything, she would not really have wanted to pass it on to Trixie Smith. She thought she would have wanted to keep Alraune secret. She felt all over again the ache of loss for Aunt Deb, who could have been consulted about this.
Still, whoever you were, said Lucy to Alraune’s uneasy legend, and whether you were real or not, you churned up a few nightmares for me, so now that you seem to have been resurrected, so to speak, I think I might like to know a bit more about you. I don’t really know very much at all, and I’m not even sure what your place would be in the family tree. And were you really born to Lucretia, or have I simply assumed that because you were named for her film?
So what actual information was there about the dark chimera that was Alraune? Well, Alraune was supposed to have been born at the start of World War II and smuggled into one of the neutral countries when little more than a baby, to lie low in safety until the war ended. The stories of the actual smuggling varied wildly, from quite reasonable, quite credible, accounts of unobtrusive journeys in plain cars across various enemy borders, and then escalated dramatically to French-Revolution-style escapes in baskets of cabbages or mad moonlight flits inside fake coffins with plague crosses on the lids. It was these last tales that made Alraune’s existence sound like the purest fantasy. But other than this, there was not a great deal to go on.
Everyone in the family had always shied away from discussing Alraune. Aunt Deb had once said that Alraune’s childhood had been bitterly tragic, but she had also said that Alraune was better forgotten. But ‘bitterly tragic’ could mean anything. If you related it to World War II it could mean an Ann-Frank-style incarceration in a sealed-off attic with Nazi stormtroopers searching the house, but if you took it in a more general sense it might mean an early death from some inexorable disease.