He turned to the next page of the journal. The entries seemed to be from around the same period, but they were mostly about ordinary, everyday things. Lessons with the governess, church, one or two mild local social events.
On one page, though, Luisa had written, ‘It is now more important than ever to fight Leonora. If she finally takes over my mind, I will have none of my own memories, only hers. There will be no memories left of Stephen – of the feel of his hand taking mine. I will not let her overpower me, I will not.’
Michael thought that whether or not Luisa’s fear of Leonora was due to some incipient madness, it was still deeply disturbing. For a wild moment he wondered whether Leonora had eventually succeeded – whether he had sat down to dinner and shared those curious conversations with Luisa or with Leonora.
The library room was warm, and Fosse House was silent and unthreatening. Michael was even starting to feel slightly drowsy. Through the drowsiness he heard the faint chimes of a church clock, and rowsed sufficiently to count them. Midnight. The dead vast and middle of the night, if you believed the Bard. The hour when drowsy darkness rolled over hushed cities.
It was ridiculous to remember all the myths and legends about midnight, but he was absurdly relieved to realize he had crossed its symbolic Rubicon, always supposing he had been worried about that, which of course he had not. But the chimes had woken him up, and perhaps it would be as well to stay awake if he could. There were only six hours until it would start to get light, anyway. He would divide those hours into sections. First he would finish reading Luisa’s journal, and then he would make a search of this room to see if he could find any more of Iskander’s insouciant chronicles. He might even risk a quick sortie to the kitchen for the radio; all the stations broadcast twenty-four hours a day, and a little night music might cheer up the spooks. Or there might be a phone-in programme on somewhere. He had an immediate image of himself phoning in and explaining he was forced to spend the night in what appeared to be a haunted house so he would be grateful for any helpful ideas on how best to pass the time. It would probably bring half the weirdos in the country out of the woodwork, but it might make for an entertaining hour or so.
This reminded him he had a chapter of the current Wilberforce book still to write, and that Wilberforce might usefully be entangled in a broadcasting situation. This was such a promising idea that he reached for his notebook to write it down before he forgot it, and spent an absorbed half hour sketching out Wilberforce’s foray into a local studio to act as a disc jockey, during which he dropped most of the discs, sat on the rest, and the army of inventive and gleeful mice who were always on the watch invaded the studio to plug Wilberforce into the shipping forecast instead.
Michael made a note to ask Nell’s Beth what pop groups were currently in favour with the eight-and nine-year-olds who would read the book, and then, this satisfactorily dealt with, got up to stretch his legs by examining the contents of the bookshelves. In the main the titles were dry looking scholarly works, but the lower shelves held a rather ragged collection of paperbacks – Luisa’s Agatha Christies, and also what looked like some of her old school-books. He pulled one or two out and flipped through the pages, interested to see the teaching methods from the 1940s.
He was just thinking he would tackle the rest of Luisa’s journal when the church clock chimed one. As the single sonorous note died away, Michael became aware of other sounds from outside, and they were exactly the sounds he had hoped not to hear.
Soft footsteps, and whispering. He turned to stare at the window, his heart racing. Someone was certainly out there, but whether it was Stephen Gilmore again or an honest-to-goodness intruder, there was no way of knowing. Luisa had said Stephen could not get in by himself because of his wounded hands, but at one o’clock in the morning Michael was not inclined to place any great reliance on that. He thought if something tapped at the window and asked to be let in, he would probably grab his car keys and beat the hell out of Fosse House, trusting to luck that the road would no longer be blocked.
He was just thinking he might do that anyway, when there was a sudden cry from the gardens, either of pain or surprise, he could not tell which. But whatever it was, it made the decision for him, because dashing through the dark gardens and risking confronting whatever was out there was clearly out of the question. Instead, he looked frantically about him for a weapon. It was probably a pointless move, but there was still a chance that this could be some local, enterprising burglar who had heard about Luisa Gilmore’s abrupt removal to hospital, and was seizing an opportunity to snaffle whatever treasures the presumably empty Fosse House might contain. Michael glanced at his phone, lying reassuringly on the desk, dropped it into a pocket, and went cautiously to the window. Moving the lamp out of the direct line, he opened the curtains by about two inches so he could look out without being seen.