13 Curses (40 page)

“So we can probably strike that off our list,” said Tanya. “If our options run out, we can go back to it.”

“The other thing is that the diaries that are still missing seem to be from Elizabeth’s time there,” Fabian added. “Florence once said that Elizabeth had the diaries brought back secretly by the maid she trusted, but they were intercepted by Lord Elvesden and destroyed. Even so, if we work to the theory that the bracelet was never at the asylum, then we don’t need to worry about the missing diaries.”

“What else?” Red asked.

“I’ve traced the location of Elizabeth Elvesden’s first home,” said Fabian. “The cottage she lived in with Miss Cromwell when Lord Elvesden first gave her the bracelet. The cottage is still there in a village about twenty miles from Tickey End. We could take a bus, but it would take a whole afternoon to get there and back—and of course we’d need a plan for getting into the house.”

“We’ll think of something,” said Tanya.

Fabian nodded.

“If the clues are anything to go by, I think one of the charms might be in the underground tunnels that Elizabeth used when she tried to escape from the manor. The bracelet broke and fell off when she was down there in the darkness.”

“It’ll be dangerous,” said Red. “Maybe even impossible to reach—I’ve been down there, remember? Some of the tunnels have collapsed.”

“It gets worse,” said Fabian. “Because think about what happened next, after she ran away.”

“Well, she died shortly afterward, didn’t she?” Red asked.

Fabian nodded. “And it was buried with her—the last significant thing to happen to it in Elizabeth’s lifetime.”

Red felt her stomach turn.

“You think one could be in the grave, don’t you? We’re going to have to dig her up.”

“It’s not like she’s going to mind,” said Fabian, although he looked as uncomfortable with this prospect as she felt. “She’s been dead for two hundred years. And if it helps bring my father back home, then I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”

“I’ll do it,” Red said grimly. “Neither of you needs to get involved. Just tell me where the grave is.”

Fabian looked over toward the church.

“You can’t go now, it’s broad daylight. You’ll be seen.”

“Obviously,” said Red, her voice scornful. “I’ll have to go at night.”

Fabian ignored the comment.

“The grave is one of the grandest in the churchyard,” he said. “A huge stone slab in the center of the cemetery, next to an identical one where Elvesden was buried. You can’t miss it.”

“You’ve got that wrong,” Tanya objected. “I went to her grave in the summer with my grandmother and there was no slab. It was a headstone, and it wasn’t in the center of the graveyard at all—it was right at the edge, over that way.”

“What are you talking about?” Fabian snorted. “I
know
where it is.”

“Clearly, you don’t,” said Tanya, also getting annoyed. “I just told you—I was there. I saw her name. We left flowers.”

“Come on, then.” Fabian jumped up. “Let’s settle it.”

On the way over to the churchyard, Red told them about her search of the garden.

“There’s no X,” she said. “I’ve hunted high and low and there’s nothing. I don’t see a way of finding out where Florence kept her imaginary treasures.”

“Unless we question her,” said Fabian. “But in a way that she won’t figure out what we’re doing.”

When they reached the church, Fabian led them through the maze of graves to two stone slabs, just as he’d described, in the center of the graveyard. They were overgrown, but he knelt and brushed aside the
trailing ivy to reveal the two names side by side: Edward and Elizabeth Elvesden.

“See?” he said smugly. “I was right.”

Tanya stared at the name in front of her in disbelief.

“That’s not right,” she said. “It can’t be. I remember. Let me show you!” She headed off determinedly, despite Fabian’s protestations, to the edge of the graveyard.

Red stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the grave. She recognized the grave; she was sure of it. Scanning the surroundings and the nearby church, she did a quick lap of the graveyard as Tanya and Fabian moved farther away, then she arrived back at the spot she had started. It was the one, as she had suspected. Looking up, she saw that Tanya was waving at her, and so she jogged over to meet them.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Fabian was saying. “There must be two people with the same name!”

Tanya pointed to the worn name on the stone. E
LIZABETH
E
LVESDEN
.

“
This
is the one my grandmother showed me. Not the other one.”

“Then what is that one?” said Fabian. “How can someone have two graves?
Why
would someone have two graves?”

“Because only one is real,” said Red. She nodded to the one in the center of the graveyard. “And it’s not that one.”

“How do you know?” Fabian demanded.

“You remember what I told you in the summer?” said Red, looking at Tanya. “How I got into the house when I was hiding out?”

“A grave,” said Tanya. “You said you got into the tunnels by a fake grave.”

“Right. And guess which one it was?”

All three of them stared back into the churchyard.

“
That’s
the fake grave?” Fabian said.

Red nodded. “I didn’t remember the name, just the location of it and some of the decorations. It’s quite lavish, not like this one.”

“This one is a lot simpler,” said Tanya.

“And it looks newer,” said Fabian. He was quiet for a few moments, scuffing the earth with the toe of his shoe. He looked at the grave, then back at the churchyard, then to the grave again.

“Notice how it’s a little way out from the others?” he said eventually. “There are only a few this far out from the church. And there, look.” He gestured to a small area of a crumbling stone foundation at ground level that divided the land into two. “See it?”

“What is it?” said Tanya.

“It looks like the remains of a wall,” said Red. “But then that would mean that a few of the graves were outside of the churchyard.”

“Weird,” Tanya added. “The graveyard couldn’t have been full, because Edward Elvesden died
after
Elizabeth, and in any case it looks like their graves were plotted many years before their deaths. Some people still do that, don’t they?”

“I’ll tell you why she was outside the churchyard,” said Fabian thoughtfully. “And why the gravestone is new. It’s what they used to do to people who were thought of as sinners in the olden days. They were buried in unmarked graves on unconsecrated ground. Elizabeth Elvesden was thought to have dabbled in witchcraft.

“It was only more recently that anyone thought to mark her resting place with a stone. The grave within the churchyard is just to save face. At the time, no one would have known that she was really buried here, all along.”

“So she was just thrown in the ground, with nothing to say who she was?” said Tanya indignantly.

“But which grave would the bracelet have been buried in?” Red asked. “We’d be lucky to get away with looking into one, let alone both!”

“That’s something we need to think about,” Fabian said. “Let’s go back.”

Grudgingly, Red put the fox-skin on again and they went back across to the manor. Once inside, they checked that the coast was clear before hurrying upstairs to Fabian’s room.

For once it was reasonably clean, though there was still a considerable amount of clutter lying about. With a sweep of his arm he cleared a space on the bed for Tanya and Red to sit down, and a shower of clothes and other bits and pieces went flying to the floor. Fabian did not sit, however. He remained on his feet and proceeded to pace the room.

“What are you doing?” Tanya asked, after a few minutes. “Apart from wearing the carpet out?”

“Quiet,” said Fabian. “I’m thinking.” He continued to pace, then went to stand by the window, staring out. “I can’t think of a way we’d find out which was the right grave to search in. But I think that the fake grave would be the best place to start, because we can get to it from the tunnels, where we’re going to search anyway. That way we can kill two birds with one stone.”

“That makes sense,” said Red. “We can get into the tunnels from the house and find our way to the grave. It’s the route I used when I hid in the house before, and I left string in the tunnels marking out the way. It should still be there.”

“Plus, if we go through the tunnels to the graveyard we won’t be seen,” said Tanya.

“I say we do it tonight,” said Fabian. “There’s no time to waste.”

Outside the window, the sun came out once more, throwing gold light onto Fabian’s face.

“All right,” said Red impatiently. “But we need to keep looking. What shall we do in the meantime?”

A slow smile spread across Fabian’s lips as, suddenly, his gaze shifted and refocused. Instead of trailing into space, his vision was now fixed on something in the garden.

“I think I’ve got the answer to that too.” He beckoned, and Red and Tanya joined him at the window,
Red standing with her hind legs on the bed and her forepaws on the windowsill.

“What are we meant to be looking at?” Red asked.

“There, in front of the rock garden,” said Fabian. “See it?”

They both saw it at the same moment. It was a shadow, cast by the sun coming over the house, a faint and misshapen X. For two or three seconds they stared before the sun went behind a cloud, taking the shadow with it.

Fabian held up his alarm clock and shoved it under Tanya’s nose, not taking his eyes from the spot.

“X marks the spot at two. What time is it now?”

“It’s half past two,” said Tanya.

“That means that the place we saw it will be slightly off the mark,” said Fabian. “Tanya, go outside and I’ll direct you until you’re standing in the right place. Then leave something to mark it—a stone or something—and we’ll come down. We don’t want to go out there and forget the spot we’ve been looking at.”

“But what is it that’s casting the shadow?” Tanya asked.

“You’ll see when you’re out there,” said Fabian.

Tanya took the hint and left. A few minutes later, she appeared in the garden accompanied by Oberon and walked over to the rock garden, standing a few paces from where the X had been. She stooped and picked something up from the ground, then looked up at the window.

With his eyes still glued in place, Fabian lifted the
window and leaned out, gesturing for Tanya to move farther back, and to the left, until she was finally standing in the correct spot. When he gave her a thumbs-up, she crouched down and marked the spot with whatever she had picked up from the ground, and then Fabian and Red went cautiously back through the house to join her. Red skulked along behind him, ready to hide or run if Florence should appear, but she didn’t, and as they passed by the sitting room, they heard her scolding the General, who had just called her a whippersnapper.

Tanya was waiting patiently for them in the garden. She pointed to a distinctive flat pebble that she had laid on the spot, and looked up at the house.

“It’s the weathervane,” she said, pointing. “That’s what’s throwing the shadow.”

Red looked up and saw the dark shape outlined against the sky. Its intersecting arrows pointed to the four corners of the earth, forming the X the young Florence had described. Sitting on top like a witch riding a broomstick was a mermaid that mirrored the one on the fountain in the front courtyard.

“Let’s dig,” said Red.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” said Fabian. “It’s not the exact spot because the timing was off.”

“How do we pinpoint the spot then?” she demanded.

“We have to wait and hope the sun comes out again,” said Fabian. “If we can plot the path the sun’s taking, we can use it to work backward.”

“You’re confusing me,” said Tanya. “And it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of the sun coming out again anyway—look at the cloud.”

Fabian squinted up at the sky.

“There’s a break over there, and the cloud seems to be traveling in that direction. If we wait, it could work, otherwise we’ll have to do it again another day, when it’s next sunny.”

Red didn’t like the idea of that at all, and neither did Tanya.

“I’m only here for a few more days,” she reminded him. “Half-term is nearly over, but I can’t go back until this is solved!”

Privately, Red thought that Tanya didn’t have much choice in the matter. But as luck would have it, ten minutes later the sun came out when the patchy cloud broke and allowed it a quick escape. It was only a few seconds, but enough, judging by Fabian’s gleeful whoop, to plot out the path of the sun. They marked the spot—this time a short distance away from the first—with another stone and watched as Fabian scratched his head while he backtracked.

“It doesn’t just go in a straight line, see,” he said. “It curves slightly as it moves, which means we could really do with one more marked place to get the idea of the curve. But I don’t think our luck’s going to hold out.”

He was right. Now that the break in the cloud had passed, the rest was coming over thicker and darker. Soon, droplets of rain were spitting.