Читать книгу The Woman In The Mirror: A haunting gothic story of obsession, tinged with suspense - Rebecca James, Rebecca James - Страница 17

Chapter 9

Cornwall, present day

Rachel didn’t like to delay once her mind was set. Twenty-four hours later she was boarding a train at Paddington, the key to Winterbourne safe in her pocket. She kept touching it, running her fingers over its ancient contours. It looked like a key that could open another world, the key to a trapdoor in the ground, beyond which strange creatures roamed and slept, and the sun rose at dusk and the moon rose at dawn.

A woman sat opposite her with a young girl. The girl was applying nail stickers, her focus entire. The woman flipped out a magazine, its cover detailing minor celebrities on vacation, with the headline SKINNY AND MISERABLE!

The train eased from its platform and a voice announced: ‘Welcome to this South West Trains service to Penzance, calling at…’ Rachel reached for her tablet and checked her mail, but it was no good, she couldn’t focus. Instead she looked through the window. It took a while to chug out of London, past the terraces under their drab grey sky, and the motion of the train made her tired. She hadn’t slept on the plane, had barely rested or stopped since she’d opened the letter, and she put her head back now and tried to relax. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the faces of the two solicitors at Quakers Oatley, sitting opposite her, their expressions by turns fascinated and grave. She had been Alice in Wonderland, tumbling down the rabbit hole, and they were as captivated by her as she was by them. These gatekeepers were about to change her life, everything she had ever thought about herself, every presumption overturned. Her instinct about their being keen to move the case on had been right. Rachel had the impression that Winterbourne was an albatross for them and they welcomed the chance to get rid of its legacy. ‘We weren’t sure we’d be able to find you,’ the woman had said, adjusting her papers in the prim, efficient manner of one pleased at their own good luck, ‘or, if we did, what your reaction would be.’

The man had run through what they knew. Rachel craved more, each answer insufficient, each explanation scattered with holes. She yearned for the names of her mother and father but was left wanting. Her grandfather was identified as a Captain Jonathan de Grey, making Constance, as the letter made clear, Rachel’s aunt. But there was no grandmother. ‘What about the captain’s wife?’ she’d asked, scouring the scant family tree as the solicitors looked apologetically on. ‘That was her, right?’ But the man shook his head. ‘Your mother,’ he said gently, ‘had different parentage…’

It was his way of saying that Captain de Grey had gone elsewhere, and that Rachel’s mother had been born a bastard as a result of his affair. But who had she been? Who was the poor woman who had given birth to Rachel in a London hospital, looked into her baby’s eyes and decided to give her up? Allegedly Constance had been the only person who knew about Rachel, and about this American orphan’s connection to her family. Why hadn’t Constance sought to find her? Why hadn’t she spoken out? Rachel tried not to feel bruised, but it was hard. All her life she had felt fundamentally rejected, and even at the threshold of this incredible discovery that same rejection snapped at her heels. Her aunt had known of her and done nothing, content to let Rachel unearth whatever truths were left behind after she’d died. It didn’t make sense. More questions, more uncertainties: it seemed the more Rachel learned, the more clueless she grew.

When she asked about Constance, the glance the solicitors exchanged implied that she hadn’t been an easy woman. Rachel told herself that, for all the romance and surprise of Winterbourne just falling into her life like a first drift of January snow, she couldn’t for a moment imagine a fairy-tale ending. All her life she had invented pictures that made sense to her – that her birth mother had been unable to cope, or that Rachel had been taken against her will, or that someone had forced her mother to give her up – and there was safety in those knowable limits. Now, every version she’d held dear exploded. It all came to this: this house, this family, and these doubts she might never be able to assuage. Quakers Oatley had dealt with the de Greys for years, but they didn’t know how Rachel fitted in – only that Constance, on her deathbed, had made an assertion that turned out to be true.

It seemed alarmingly easy to inherit one of the country’s grandest estates. Rachel signed documents, provided identification and settled a fee.

In return: a key.

‘The only one,’ said the woman, before letting it go, and Rachel felt the sheer weight of it in her hand and wondered how many had held it in years gone by. It occurred to her that the key was the only thing she had ever touched that her mother, too, might also have touched – apart from herself, of course: her own skin.

She must have dozed because the next thing she knew they were rolling through unbroken countryside and the sun was setting over the hills. The woman opposite and her daughter had gone. Rachel’s carriage was empty.

‘Excuse me,’ she asked a steward on his way past, ‘where are we?’

‘Next stop Polcreath,’ he told her.

She sat back and watched the blackening landscape.

*

Dusk was nearly complete by the time they pulled into the station. The platform was empty apart from a man on a bench, his head tucked into the collar of his coat, and a couple of passengers who had disembarked with her. A sign read TAXI and Rachel followed it out to the road, where a car was parked with its headlights on. She went to the window and named her destination. The driver seemed surprised.

‘You sure?’ he said. ‘I thought it was derelict. No one’s lived there in years.’

‘My aunt lived there.’ It felt wonderful to say it. My.

‘Climb in, then.’

She was hoping he wouldn’t talk. But: ‘You American?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where from?’

‘New York.’

‘So what brings you here? Winterbourne Hall’s not much of a tourist destination.’

‘Like I said, I have family here. Had. My aunt died recently.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Rachel sat back, handling the key once more in her pocket. It felt warm, as if radiant, shimmering in anticipation of reaching home.

‘I expect you’ve got lots to sort out, then,’ said the driver, folding a stick of gum into his mouth. He looked at her in the rear-view mirror.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, family affairs and the like. After someone dies. You know.’

‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

‘You’ll be staying a while?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘There’re people round here that can show you around, if you like.’

‘I’ll be fine. But thank you.’

‘Always friendly faces in Polcreath, you’ll see. And if you’re really short on company, I’m in the Landogger Inn most nights.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ But he’d said it with a twist of humour, which she returned. ‘The Landogger – that’s an unusual name.’

‘Named after the cliffs,’ he said, ‘right by Winterbourne. They’ll surround you. Lethal they are, too: a sudden drop. The house is right on the Landogger Bluff.’

‘You seem to know a lot about Winterbourne.’

‘Not much. Just that for those of us who’ve been in Polcreath all our lives, it’s the stuff of legends. Always there, you know, there on the hill, but no one ever goes.’

‘You must remember my family.’ It was a difficult thought, the idea that this man, friendly though he was, had been closer to her ancestors than she would ever be – that he might have seen them, heard their voices, and maybe even met them. She didn’t know how to feel as the cab drew closer to Winterbourne. A ripple of frustrated anger obscured any sense of homecoming. She wanted to know why she’d been dismissed and forgotten about: why her whole family, it seemed, had cast her aside.

‘I never met them,’ the driver said. ‘They were, and I don’t mean no offence by this, curious. Liked to keep themselves to themselves. I’m going way back now, to the sixties, when I was a boy.’ Rachel could tell by his voice that he liked the memory. ‘The de Grey children… Well, isn’t that a posh name? They weren’t children any more by the sixties, of course, but they stayed on at Winterbourne, a lad and a woman, coming up for thirty, they were. People said there was something funny about the lad, that he was gone in the head. I always thought it was odd, even then, that they should have remained at the house, unmarried, with no families of their own. It was as if they were married to each other. But listen to me, just an idle gossip, talking about your people like I knew them myself.’

He met her gaze in the mirror and she was thankful night was falling. She didn’t want him to see the naked truth: that these were mysteries she could not yet answer. That he, an ‘idle gossip’, knew more about her family than she did.

‘Are we close?’ Rachel said.

‘Not far now,’ he replied. ‘Not far at all.’

*

It was, in fact, another half an hour, and by the time they reached the Winterbourne gates the night outside was pitch black. They’d left the last settlement many miles ago, and the house was so alone and remote that not one light of civilisation could be seen anywhere across the black, boundless moors. The only glow was the glow of the moon, which hung above them like a marble, throwing the sea into glittering grey.

As Rachel stepped out of the cab, glad of its reassuring interior bulbs and the familiar hum of its engine, she looked above at the sky. The stars were immense. Stars like this didn’t exist above New York. Exotic words surfaced in her mind – Cassiopeia, Betelgeuse, Europa. She must have learned them long ago and forgotten, or else had little reason to remember, but here, beneath the vast beauty of space, the stars appeared to her as jewels, unfathomably rare and precious.

‘You sure you’ll be all right?’ The driver leaned over as she got out. ‘There’s a warm bed at the Landogger, I’ll bet. I can always take you back there.’

Rachel shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Winterbourne was hers, after all. Staying here alone might be a foreboding prospect, but she felt as if the house and its ghosts had thrown her a challenge. She had been held back for too many years, against her will, ignorant of its existence, robbed of her choice, letting the years drain out like bath water. She had a choice now, and she’d never find answers if she ran away.

She paid the driver and watched his tail lights disappear into the night. She turned to the mansion, her eyes travelling up its enormous façade, whose shape, in the darkness, she could barely decipher. It loomed, shadow-like, amorphous and huge, a lake of black except where the moonlight caught it and a detail could be glimpsed, like the snap of glass in a window or the gnarled arm of a tree. She regretted her decision – although it hadn’t been conscious, just the way things had worked out – to arrive so late. It’ll be better in the morning, she told herself, bracing herself against the long night ahead. Wait for the daylight. She could hear the roar of the sea against the Landogger cliffs, the foam and spit of it as it churned against rocks.

She took the key from her pocket and let herself in.