Devil and the Deep (The Ceruleans: Book 4) (16 page)

I made it an hour downstairs helping Cara and Luke and Si on
the stand amid the fast-growing throngs of people – excited brides-to-be and
battleaxe mothers and hen-pecked fathers and bewildered-looking grooms. I stood
beside the stand, smiling and chatting to those who stopped to look at Cara’s
wares and trying to get my head around the transformation of this once
cavernous, cold hallway into the very heart of a marketplace. But too quickly I
felt like I was drowning in the tide of wedding planners – suffocating.

I tugged on Luke’s arm to get his attention, interrupting
him mid-conversation with a lady who was sniffing a beaded bag. He took one
look at my face and said ‘Excuse me’ to the bag lady and then ‘Cara, we’re
taking a break’ and then ‘C’mon, Scarlett’.

Slipping his arm around me, he led me out of the main doors
and along the driveway, neatly steering me around a juggler, a magician and a
balloon modeller, and down a deserted path along the side of the house. At the
end we turned the corner and stumbled straight into a menagerie of animals in
cages and pens, and a horde of people clamouring for a complimentary
I Dove
You
Wedding Animal Rentals
keyring
.

‘Blimey,’ said Luke, eyeing a miniature donkey braying in
its pen, ‘is anywhere wedding mania free here?’

Speaking was too much, so I just pointed towards the far end
of the estate. It was an area Luke knew well.

‘Good idea,’ he said as he guided me past a strutting
peacock. ‘That’s better,’ he said as we slipped through an archway and saw a
clear path ahead of us. ‘Come on.’ His hand pressed my back and he set off at
his usual pace, but I had to grab him and shake my head.

‘What…?’

He looked down at my mermaid skirt and high heels. ‘Oh, I
see. Leisurely stroll it is then.’

The effect of an hour in uproarious crowds appeared to have
unleashed a rush of adrenaline in Luke, and unable to expel it physically, he
became uncharacteristically talkative:

‘… I mean, I’ve heard of doves for a wedding, but donkeys,
really?… Did you see that hen and stag supplies stall? Who knew they made pasta
in
that
shape?… At least fifteen orders already; Cara’ll be beside
herself on the drive back… A cool thousand for cake toppers modelled on the
bride and groom; I’m in the wrong catering business… Videographer chap
wandering about; did you see him – he had you right in shot…’

Eventually, when we reached the wildflower meadow, my
silence registered with Luke. He stopped us at the bottom of the long hill we
were about to climb.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Are you upset? Have I said something
wrong? Because when you came down the stairs in that dress and I said “Oh my
God!”, you know I meant “Oh my God, you are the most beautiful creature in the
world and I can’t believe you’re my girlfriend”, not “Oh my God, what the hell
are you wearing”, right?’

I managed a wavery, ‘Right.’

Suddenly, Luke was alarmed. ‘What is it? All the people –
have you overdone it – do you need to leave?’

I shook my head. I’d thought that was it when we were inside
– simple exhaustion from the crowds. But being away should have brought instant
relief, and yet I still felt like I was suffocating. Because, I realised abruptly,
I was.

‘Dress,’ I gasped. ‘Lacing at the back.’

In an instant Luke was at my back, wrestling with the ties.

‘Man these are tight. Was your mum
trying
to kill
you?’

‘Didn’t want… wardrobe malfunction.’

‘A what? Hang on... got it!’

Relief flooded through me as the vice around my chest eased
right off.

Luke came around to face me. ‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Bliss,’ I said. ‘Who knew breathing was so essential?’

He grinned. ‘Shall we sit in our spot?’

I looked up to the top of the hill. There I’d sat after we’d
broken up, when I’d lost Luke and fled to Hollythwaite in pieces. There Luke
had found me when he’d raced up here to bring me home.

‘Perfect,’ I said.

Hand in hand, we climbed the hill – no mean feat for me in a
mermaid skirt. At the top Luke trampled some grasses and flowers and then
shrugged off the jacket Cara had insisted he wear and laid it down. I sat carefully
and he settled beside me. Together, we looked down at Hollythwaite. From up
here the visitors looked like swarming ants.

‘So many people,’ I said.

‘Your mum must be thrilled – the wedding fair is a huge
success.’

‘Yes, but so many people!’

He put an arm around me and I laid my head on his shoulder.

‘Want to hide up here for a while?’ he offered.

‘A long while, please.’

‘Okay. Could get a little boring, though. We may have to
find…
things
to do.’

What was there to do, exactly, up a hill? But Luke’s next
words made that abundantly clear:

‘I see what you mean about the wardrobe malfunction.’

He gestured to my chest, and I looked down, then grabbed the
bodice of the dress and held it to me. His hand covered mine.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Let it go.’

‘But…’

‘Or if you don’t want to ruin the dress, take it off.’

My head snapped around. He arched an eyebrow suggestively.

‘But Luke... we’re up a hill... people could see us...’

‘So we go over the brow of the hill. Or to the hideaway.’

The treehouse. Where we’d been close before, very close. But
the risk – I hadn’t decided myself whether I could risk it – I hadn’t told him
still – I wasn’t ready –

‘Unless you don’t want to,’ said Luke, and his fingers,
which had been tracing circles on my back, stilled.

‘No!’  I said quickly. ‘I
want
to.’ And I did. Of
course I did. ‘It’s just...’

‘It’s just what, Scarlett?’

When I didn’t reply, because my racing mind couldn’t come up
with a decent answer, he let go of me. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he
pulled them up to his chest and stared silently down at Hollythwaite. Without
his touch I was cold, and I hugged my dress to me tightly and tried not to cry.

Tried, and failed.

When he heard my breath catch, he glanced at me and cursed
under his breath.

‘I’m sorry...’ I began, but he cut me off.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t.’

He stood up and walked a few steps downhill. I saw his
shoulders fall and rise with a deep breath, and then he turned back to me and
said, ‘I hate it when you’re sorry, Scarlett. I don’t want you to be sorry. I
just want you to be yourself. If you don’t want to... then that’s fine. Just
own it, all right? Don’t be sorry. Don’t make me the bad guy who’s pushing you
into it. I’m
not
that guy.’

‘I know you’re not!’ I said, scrambling to my feet. ‘I never
meant for you to feel that way!’

‘Well, you did. You have.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Will you stop being sorry!’

‘S–’

I clamped a hand over my mouth, and he made a sound of
frustration that turned into a laugh. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ he
said, rubbing a hand over his face.

‘I don’t want to upset you,’ I said. ‘It’s just... I
don’t...’

‘Will you
stop
it! Stop beating yourself up. If you
can’t say the words then don’t.’

I gaped at him. He was never usually so blunt.

With two strides he came back to me. Hands on my waist, he
looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Scarlett Blake, when are you going to realise
that I know you? I know you’re worried about something, and I know you don’t
want to share that with me right now. And yes, that leaves me in the dark –
again. But I don’t need to know right now. I don’t need to have a
deep-and-meaningful with you. I just need to kiss you until you forget to hold
your dress up.’

He grinned cheekily, and a laugh burbled up in me and
escaped.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Your smile is beautiful.
You’re
beautiful. In that dress. In this field. In the sunshine. Can I kiss you
senseless now?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

So he did.

What a kiss.

Whatakiss.

What

a

kiss.

Poppies dancing at my ankles, dandelion seeds catching in my
hair, a butterfly clinging to my skirt... I knew nothing, only him. And I
whispered:

‘Treehouse.’

It wasn’t the coolness in the air that ended the fairytale
escape. Nor the entanglement of one of my hair combs in a fraying blanket. Nor,
even, the impressively large splinter I’d just dug out of my shin. It was
Kasabian’s ‘Lost Souls Forever’.

‘Sorry,’ said Luke, scrabbling in his jeans pocket for his
phone. He brought it out, checked the display, groaned, hit ‘answer’, touched
it to his ear and said, ‘What, Cara?’

As he listened to his sister chattering away excitedly, I
looked around the treehouse. For an old play space, it was surprisingly free
from dirt and dust and bugs. The windows were cracked but clean, and in a few
places new boards had been nailed over holes. A shelf above the door held some
basic camping kit, and a few worn blankets were piled up on a crate in the
corner. I was glad to see someone was taking care of my old den – William,
perhaps, out of a sense of nostalgia, or Laurence and Kathryn, the kids from
the next-door estate.

‘I don’t know, Cara,’ said Luke. ‘Yes, if she rests. But
it’s up to her, okay?’ With that he ended the call.

‘What’s up to me?’ I asked.

‘Remember the plan was to leave mid-afternoon, so you could
get back and rest up? Well, your mum’s invited us to stay on this evening for
some wedding music showcase.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm in it.’

‘You want to stay?’

‘Do you?’

‘Kind of depends on the acts. If it’s some cheesy bloke on a
keyboard wailing that song from
Titanic
…’

I laughed.

Luke laughed.

We grinned stupidly at each other.

Amazing what a tumble in a treehouse could do for creating a
happy glow. And I was happy. What we’d just done was right. I loved Luke, he
loved me – we were good together. Young. Free.
Alive
.

I’d tell him, of course I would, about the children. But
they didn’t exist here, now. They were ghosts. They could wait until we got
home.

All at once, I was eager to extend this little escape from
Twycombe.

‘Okay, we’ll stay,’ I said. ‘So long as I can change out of
this dress.’

‘Or keep it on,’ he suggested. ‘But leave the top undone.’

I gave him a little shove and his grin widened – but then
dimmed as he said:

‘You’ll need some time alone now. So you can manage staying
on.’

‘Right. Can I borrow your phone?’

He passed it over, and I rang my mother and explained I had a
headache and needed somewhere quiet for a lie-down. She was delighted we were
staying for the evening and quickly offered up the gatekeeper’s lodge as a
sanctuary.

‘Spare key under the Buddha statue in the garden,’ she said.
‘Help yourself to whatever you want inside. There’s clean towels in the
bathroom. Oh, but my bedroom’s locked. And the guest-room bed isn’t fully
assembled yet. So if you’re lying down, it’ll have to be on the sofa.’

‘Sure, Mum,’ I said. A lock on her bedroom door? Clearly,
she’d considered the possibility of showing me her new home today. She
really
didn’t want me seeing her blue room and its memory wall.

‘Off you go then,’ said Luke once I hung up. ‘You can Travel
to the lodge, right?’

I nodded.

‘Right, well come and find me when you’re ready. I’ll be the
bloke with
lackey
felt-tipped on his forehead who’s knee-deep in beads
and bows and frills and lace and heaven knows what else.’

I leaned over and gave him a last, lingering kiss. ‘Speaking
of lace… just one last thing, before I go. Those black bands you’ve got wrapped
around your wrists?’

‘Oh. I forgot to take them off.’

‘You might want to. They’re not, as Cara told you earlier,
motion sickness bands to counteract the effects of travelling in a Mini Cooper.
They’re garters.’

‘Which are?’

‘Lingerie. For holding up stockings.’

‘
What?
When I get my hands on her, I’ll –’

Laughing, I faded away.

*

I didn’t bother with the spare key under the statue, I
simply Travelled into the living room of the lodge. There, I plomped down on
the sofa – and promptly regretted it when the slender white leather design
revealed it didn’t just look like some kind of stretched stiletto shoe but was
as uncomfortable as one too. I sighed. The abrupt change from treehouse passion
with a laughing-eyed guy to isolation in a silent show home was a bit of a
shock.

What to do with myself to pass the next couple of hours?
Watch some TV? I couldn’t see one anywhere. Read a book? The only one in sight
was a thick guide to venue management. My drooping eyelids made the decision
for me, and I slid down to lie on the sofa. Shifted position. Shifted position
again. Fell off. Got back on. Fidgeted about. Found The Spot. Closed my eyes
and let myself drift.

*

Scarlett, are you awake?

No.

Why are you here?

Sleeping.

But why here – on the floor?

Mum’s bed’s out of bounds. So I don’t find out her
secrets.

What secrets are in her bed?

Room. Bedroom. Pictures of her with my father. He was a
Cerulean, you know.

Was?

Name’s Rafe.

Rafe? Your mother told you that?

Yes. She loved him. They made babies together, you know. Sienna
and me.

Sienna and you.

That’s what I said.

A happy family, Rafe and Elizabeth and Sienna and
Scarlett.

Not happy. They split up. He left. She lost the plot.

Do you forgive them that?

What does it matter now?

What does it matter?

You know, you have this habit of parroting. Hey, who did
you say you were?

I didn’t.

Well, tell me now.

I don’t need to. You know me, Scarlett.

*

There’s nothing quite like an afternoon nap to chase away
the cobwebs. Except when you wake up on the floor, having slipped off the
world’s most useless sofa, with your heart pounding and the vestiges of a
bizarre dream tugging at your consciousness.

I was on a hilltop – not the hilltop in the meadow, but one
with no colour or texture, no movement even. I was talking to someone there, a
man, and I couldn’t place him. But when I woke up, there was a name on my lips:
Peter
. Dreaming of him wasn’t especially odd. But his being so obscure
was a little unsettling. I mean, he hadn’t even looked like my grandfather –
more like a stickman.

A memory stirred – a picture on Mum’s bedroom wall. I hadn’t
paid it much attention when I’d last been here, engrossed as I was in the
family photograph. But now I felt the urge to go back and look again.

I shouldn’t. Mum had locked the room up for a reason. But
then it wasn’t like I was going to see anything I hadn’t seen before. And what
she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

Seconds later I was standing once more in front of my
mother’s memory wall. This time, I didn’t just hover at a respectful distance
like an art gallery visitor; this time I reached up and lifted one of the
picture frames off its hook. I took it to the bed and sat down to study it.

I’d assumed, when I’d last seen this picture, that it was
one of Sienna’s drawings, or perhaps mine, from childhood. There was such a
simplicity to it: four stickpeople hand in hand on an impossibly round hill,
above which a circle and ten slashes represented a jolly sun. But the picture
wasn’t on paper, I realised now; it was on a paper napkin. And the lines, the
curves, the proportions, on closer inspection none of them had the crooked
charm of a child’s work.

I sat for a while and looked at the stickman and the
stickwoman and the two little stickgirls, each with a half-moon smile. The
napkin seemed a bizarre item to treasure. But the very fact that Mum had framed
it and put it up on her wall indicated that it was important to her. Why?

My fingers fumbled on the catches at the back of the frame.
Gently, I freed the thick card backing and lifted it away. I took the napkin
carefully from its frame. Mum had folded it so that the picture fitted the
mount, and now I smoothed it flat, looking for some extra detail.
Unsurprisingly, there was no artist’s signature. Nothing at all to see, only
the merest suggestion of a scent. I lifted the napkin to my face and inhaled.
Vinegar, I thought.

As I pondered that discovery, my eyes drifted – and then
widened as they encountered a most disturbing sight: a girl in a gaping wedding
gown with haystack hair, panda eyes and an old musty napkin clutched to her
nose.

‘Holy cow, Scarlett,’ I told the girl in the mirror. ‘Get it
together!’

What had happened to ditching all curiosity about the past,
all the thinking and wondering and worrying? Out there Mum and Cara and Luke
were waiting for me to join them and have some fun. That’s why I was here, at
Hollythwaite. That’s why I’d come back to them all in the first place: to have
a life. So what the heck was I doing delving about in my mother’s private space
analysing napkin scrawls?

Grumbling at myself, I quickly set to work refolding the
napkin. But somewhere in all my waving it about one of the tissue plies had
worked loose, and the more I tried to smooth it down, the more it stuck to my
hands.

‘Fine!’ I snapped at last and pulled the wispy layer off
entirely.

The other plies lay flat obediently and I positioned them in
the frame and fastened the back on securely. Then I re-hung the little picture
of the happy family Mum had once dreamed of and headed to the bathroom in
search of soap, water and a hairbrush, before Travelling back to Mum’s old
bedroom in the big house to retrieve clothes that didn’t leave me with a choice
between suffocation and full frontal nudity.

*

To my recollection, I’d never been in the rose garden at
Hollythwaite in the dark. I’d certainly never been there sitting on a little
stone bench with a gorgeous guy at my side. Nor with a glass of Buck’s Fizz in
my hand pressed there by my mother. Nor, indeed, listening to a song by the eighties’
band Bucks Fizz belted out by a fake-tan-aficionado with a thick Glaswegian
accent.

‘Well, I suppose it’s better than her last song,’ said Luke.
‘That “Twist and Shout” was twisted and shouted.’

‘Wishing we hadn’t stayed?’

The arm flung around my back drew me closer. ‘’Course not,’
he said. ‘Besides, some of the others were pretty good.’

I had to agree. One hour into the music showcase and we’d
seen a wide range of acts, ranging from an opera singer to a classical string
quartet to a thirty-piece swing band to a pretty decent Adele impersonator to a
modern rock band. The music quality was somewhat hampered by the small PA
system working to amplify sound through the sprawling Hollythwaite grounds, but
from our vantage point at the back of the garden – Luke and me on a bench, Cara
and Si and my mother on a picnic blanket on the grass before us – we weren’t a
million miles from feeling we were at an outdoor concert. Albeit one with a
quite random soloist appearing mid-line-up.

‘I should’ve known,’ groaned Mum. ‘With a name like Rubyella
Rocks, she was bound to be terrible.’

‘Rubyella?’ said Cara. ‘I’m sure they vaccinated us against
that at school.’

Mum patted her arm kindly. ‘That’s
rubella
. German
measles. Easy mistake, though.’

‘Anyway,’ said Si, ‘I don’t think you need to worry about
her being terrible.’

Cara look horrified. ‘
Si-
mon! I thought you had
better music taste than that!’

‘I do – I hope. But look around. Some of the brides-to-be
are
loving
this cheese.’

We all looked at the people scattered across the lawn in
front of us. Most of them were sitting on the picnic blankets Mum had supplied.
But a sizeable minority of the women were up and bopping along to the music in
the manner of girls about town.

‘Perhaps a little less free Buck’s Fizz for the next wedding
fair,’ I suggested to Mum, and she laughed.

‘I’ll add that to my do’s and don’ts list for next time,’
she said. ‘Right under “Do make clear that cake displays aren’t edible” and “Don’t
exhibit I Dove You Wedding Animal Rentals”.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Luke, ‘I quite enjoyed the “miniature
donkey on the loose” part of the day.’

We all laughed, but I thought Mum looked a bit strained, so
I said, ‘Mum, you’ve done an amazing job. Especially for your first event.’

Luke and Cara and Si quickly agreed.

‘Have you enjoyed it?’ I asked my mother.

There was no trace of anxiety left in her eyes as she said, ‘Oh
yes. This is the first time I’ve felt truly useful in… I don’t know how long.
Just to have a purpose, you know, to work towards something. And I love seeing
the old place full of people – it’s how it should be, don’t you think?’

I was about to answer when I heard a rustling behind. I
turned around, but all I saw was a rose bush swaying. Then I felt a warm breath
of air on my face and heard a voice, low and urgent, by my ear:

‘It’s Michael. Make an excuse and meet me in the house.
Upstairs. Quickly. It’s important.’

‘Scarlett?’ Mum’s voice. I shot back around to face her.

‘I was just saying –’ she began, but I leapt up.

‘Need the toilet!’ I announced. ‘Back in a bit.’

I left Luke looking perplexed and Mum grumbling about my
lack of ladylike decorum and I walked quickly away. I entered the house through
the conservatory, paced quickly across, smiled at a wayward bride coming out of
the toilet in the hallway and then hurried up the stairs. At the top I halted –
to the left was the west wing, leading to my old bedroom and Sienna’s, to the
right the east wing, which had been Mum and Hugo’s.