I bent over, pressed against Ellen’s thigh, and saw the hidden pearl.
It looked like a little lost moon, wedged tight in the gap. It must have dropped in and rolled into place. I could just poke the tip of my pinkie finger in and feel its cool smoothness there. But it was stuck fast.
‘Strathfearn showed me,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s the last of the Reliquary pearls. I tried to pick it out with hairpins and whatnot, but it wants to stay.’
‘Did he tell you how it got there? Or what happened to the rest of them?’
‘He didn’t like to talk about them. They made him sad; I think he’d sold them, or was thinking about selling them … and then regretted not keeping them together with the Reliquary. I never saw the rest.’
She turned her head to look at me.
‘This one …’ Her tone was matter of fact, but her voice was quiet. ‘Your grandad said it was put there long ago by a wee girl playing about with them like marbles.’
‘Oh.’
I stared back at her in amazement.
‘He must have meant me.’
‘Likely he did,’ she said drily. She didn’t ever seem to get excited about anything.
But I hadn’t made those pearls up. I hadn’t imagined them. They’d been real.
I closed my eyes, my finger resting on the cool surface of the pearl I could never play marbles with again. And even though I knew now that the Reliquary pearls had been real, it was still like an image from a dream: the black cup brimming with milky pearls, dove-grey and dove-pink, all different sizes, a little galaxy of gleaming planets in a small shadowy celestial sphere.
*
I woke up in the middle of that night feeling haunted. The clouds had temporarily cleared and there was a round silver moon sailing high in a bottle-blue sky and bathing everything with otherworldly light. The moonlight fell right across my face and once I was awake I couldn’t go back to sleep. I padded very silently to Mémère’s dressing table and found a nail file, and then sat on my bed in the fairy glow of the moon for a while, giving myself a manicure and thinking of all the people who had lived and died in that house in its hundred years. Grandad was born and died in that very room.
But I wasn’t feeling haunted by Grandad – or even by the miserable Dr Housman. I was suddenly, sharply, overwhelmingly aware of all Strathfearn’s quiet, hidden, ancient past: my vanished medieval great-grandparents who left behind the empty, towering halls of Aberfearn Castle, and their vanished great-grandparents, who carved the starey-eyed fish on the standing stones that were already old; and the folk before them who left nothing but strange green mounds and iron blades; and those who built the buried boat and raised the walking stones.
I thought: Their blood runs in my veins. They are alive in me.
But that made me feel even creepier, as though my very self were part ghost. I could just imagine how Ferdinand felt, shipwrecked in The Tempest, where the isle is full of noises.
All those people who lived here before us – their ghosts belong here. But Hugh Housman’s doesn’t. It is surely an unquiet ghost.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes –
Mémère interrupted my rhapsody by asking me crossly, in French, to stop filling the isle with noise (the very quiet noise of buffing my nails), so I put on my school blazer over my nightgown and went downstairs.
I opened the French doors to the glorious moon. But I also switched on the lamp to banish the ghosts, and after a while it started to get buggy. The moths battering against the lampshade were both annoying and a bit spooky. I put out the light and sat in the dark for a while longer with the doors open, to give the insects a chance to leave. Then I closed the doors and went back upstairs.
And then I lay awake for another twenty minutes wondering whether or not I’d bolted the doors.
This was wholly irrational. What in the world was I worrying about? Bolts don’t keep out ghosts, and dead men won’t come in on their own!
If you’re scared, do something, Julie, I told myself. Go back down and check the bolts if you think it matters!
So, back into my school blazer and back down the staircase bloodied by the strange dark wines and indigos of moonlit stained glass, back along the inky oak-panelled corridor to the morning room. It was entirely still apart from one imprisoned moth fluttering vainly against an upper windowpane. I stepped into the room.
The French doors suddenly shuddered as if they’d been caught in a tempest.
It would have been startling even if my nerves hadn’t already been stretched to snapping. I didn’t scream – I dived under the legs of the Queen Anne settee and cowered there in absolute mindless terror like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.
The door handle rattled with the sound of a skeleton dancing on a tile floor.
I had my brain back, though my heart was galloping, and I knew it wasn’t a ghost. But what in the world –
The noise scared me nearly out of my skin. I’d thrown myself on the floor as if I’d been caught on the moor in a hail of gunshot. Now I didn’t dare stand up. It was that kind of instinct: protect yourself, Julie.
I peeked out under the settee between its legs and I could see the shadow at the door – bulky and shapeless – and the door handle rattled again, but indeed I had bolted it after all and it didn’t open.
The dark silhouette stood there, just quiet, not moving, for another minute. I counted how long and it seemed to take forever. Then I saw it put up a hand and scratch its head. It reached towards the door again, then changed its mind and edged away.
I let out a little strangled laugh. There was something so very ordinary about the way this terrifying shadow had moved.
I heard the rattle of the door to Frank’s office. Then there was no more noise.
It couldn’t have been a burglar – he didn’t try to break in. It was somebody checking the doors to see if they would open or not, but I didn’t know why.
If you’re scared, do something! I gave myself another fierce lecture.
All in a rush, I ran at our door, unbolted it and threw it open.
There was no one on the terrace. I stomped out into the moonlight and stood there defiantly in my nightgown and school blazer with bare feet cold against the damp stone, listening. I seemed to stand there for ages and heard nothing. Where on earth had he gone so quickly? Was he hiding below the steps to the lawn?
I didn’t have the confidence to look. Words leaped into my head and I sang aloud, quavering and ridiculous:
‘My castle is aye my ain,
An’ harried it never shall be,
For I’ll fall ere it’s ta’en –
An’ wha dare meddle wi’ me?’
‘Julia!’
Mother had the French doors open in the room above. She was kneeling on my bed and leaning out of the window to scold me.
‘For goodness’ sake, Julia, stop that racket and come to bed!’