House of Bells (26 page)

Weirdly, he hardly seemed to blink when she told him about the bells. She couldn't see Ruth's face in the driving mirror – she did look – but the only sound that came from the back seat sounded more like a murmur of sympathy than the cynical snort she was expecting.

‘Why's that, then?' the doctor asked. ‘D'Espérance will do any amount of strange, hard things to you, if you come primed for it – but why bells? What do bells mean to you?'

She didn't have to tell him. She could just say
mind your own business
, or – as he knew who she was –
work it out for yourself.
He was smart enough, and his wife perhaps was smarter, at least in the ways that women work. She'd tell him, now or later. Grace need only shake her head, refuse, sit silent, let the moment by.

But he had that magic that some priests have, some doctors, some vicars. Some men: she'd never felt it in a woman.

At any rate, he asked the question and waited, and despite her firm intentions she found herself telling him, flat and simple.

‘They rang a bell for my baby, on and on. I haven't been able to stand bells since. And then I came here, and . . . and started bleeding every time . . .'

And here they were, coming up the back drive, the same way that Cookie had brought her yesterday, only yesterday; and he parked in the yard behind the house, and now she could slip out of the car without saying anything more, leave him with that to mull over, not give herself away any further. She could smile brightly and thank him for the ride, thank them both; promise to tell the captain and Webb too that they were here; duck in through the door and disappear and be gone, before either one of them could ask her to show them up to where Kathie lay in waiting.

S
he hardly knew the house yet, hardly at all. Nothing was instinctive; her body didn't know which way to go, and nor did she. All she wanted was to get away, to be not there, not with them, not facing Kathie.

Of course she got lost. She was lost from the beginning. She walked into the house and the first thing she saw was that the ship's bell had gone from the corridor –
thank you, Tom
– and the second thing she saw was a stairway, and she just took it.

The first room she'd woken up in, the room she'd shared with Kathie, was on the second storey; Webb's room was one floor below. He'd be in one or the other. Despite her promise, she wasn't going anywhere near him. Instead she kept on going up, and was straightaway in unknown territory.

Up and up, and here were the attics: long dormitories, mattresses on the floor, and hung about with gaudy fabrics.
We all sleep together
, but some people erected walls anyway; sheets of cotton and sheer satin hung from the rafters to make cubicles that offered something that might almost be possession, almost privacy, almost.

She walked through one dormitory and another, interconnected; and no bells rang, and no hands clutched at her out of shadow, and there was nobody up here at this time of day, and even so she felt haunted, she felt watched.

Here was a staircase, and she was only a little lost yet. She thought that if she went down there, she'd find her way to the main hall and the captain's room behind. Which would again give her a chance to keep her promise, and again she avoided it. Turned the corner and kept on walking: all the length of the house, attic after attic, until she reached another staircase and another right angle, into the wing she hadn't broached yet.

She thought they didn't use it. She remembered Webb's announcement last night, that the electrics were out; she thought she shouldn't take the house on trust, in the half-dark.

Wouldn't have done, except that there was light coming up from below, down the stairwell.

Everyone she was avoiding, she thought, was most likely behind her. Someone had said this wing was empty, and someone was here none the less; and she was curious, and stubborn, and hated running away.

Besides, she was here as a spy, wasn't she? It was her job, it was her duty to snoop out secrets.

Down the stairs she went, then. Slowly, carefully, treading as light-footed as she knew how. No one she knew would believe it of her, but Grace had learned the hard way what Georgie had always known: how to fade into the background, how to be invisible in company. How to survive, that meant, in prison. Before then she'd been all look-at-me, all the time, and people always had. Since then she'd been faking it at parties, doing what she was paid for, but trying to stay insignificant in-between. Unseen. It didn't always work, it couldn't, especially when she had to keep her face in the papers or no one would hire her for their parties any more; she had to keep notorious, but she did her best to sidle unnoticed from one engagement to the next, even from one room to another. She used to walk the iron stairs of Holloway so silently the other women took to calling her the ghost.

These stairs, well-seasoned wood set into stone, and in these simple sandals? Not a problem. Not a creak. She went down and down again, into the soft glow of an oil lamp set on a table in an empty hallway.

This was the ground floor; the double doors that faced her were high and half-open, alluring to the spy. Dust and silence both hung in the air. There was light beyond the doors, flickering, uncertain. There had to be someone around, but – well, she had to look.

She tiptoed like a child across the parquet floor, ducked her head briefly around the door, ducked back again.

A library. A house like this? Of course there was a library. She should have thought; she should have looked before.

A library lit by candlelight, by a long aisle of candles laid between its alcoves, from one end to the other. They stood in saucers on the bare floor, a long way – quite a long way – from the high ranks of formal dark-spined books, and even so: it didn't look safe to her. Open flames and so much wood and paper; pools of molten wax all set to spill. Let one taper tip over, topple into its neighbour's saucer, splash burning wax on to the parquet, a spreading river seeking out the shelves . . .

She didn't even want to go inside, she really didn't.

Tony would expect her to, and Tony got what Tony wanted; that was a rule.

Too bad for her.

In she went, then. It wasn't bravery, just a kind of sullen determination. She'd do what she came for, if she could. She'd do her best to make Tony happy. She'd realized long since that she couldn't do that for herself, so why not do it for him instead? Leaving someone happy had to be better than the other thing.

She was still afraid, and not only of fire. Even after last night, hot hands reaching. High shelves jutted out into the room, dividing up the space like stable stalls, two facing rows of alcoves, walls of books. Anyone might lurk behind any one of those partition walls; someone surely must be lurking somewhere. Someone had lit these candles, after all.

Nevertheless. She stepped out from behind the door, into that broad aisle of lights.

She almost wanted to sing as she went, to keep her spirits up. She was still treading softly, though; and while she could tiptoe and make a wilful noise, both together – and make a case for both, Georgie struggling for silence while Grace sang, two impulses in the same body – it would still be stupid, and she wouldn't do it.

Wanted to.

Wouldn't.

It was hard to see even into the first alcoves, on either side of her, even with a clear line of sight. The bare thin light of these first few candles struggled against the shifting shadows cast by the lines ahead, could hardly reach the side walls at all. She peered anyway, this way and that: saw nobody lurking in the dark, wanted to huff aloud with relief, swallowed it down.

Sidled further down the aisle, past those first alcoves; peered warily into the next.

Still no one.

She could see now why it was so dark in here, why candles gave the only light. On one side, the back wall was shelved all the way up to the iron gallery, where more shelves climbed to the ceiling. Books swallowed light, she thought, as though they needed it to read by. To read themselves, to keep their own words fresh: like blood to the tissues.

On the other side there were windows between the partitions, and it should still be light enough out there to see by – but the windows were all shuttered against the day, against the world. It seemed . . . deliberate, like a statement, but surely not the captain's. Nor Webb's. Their visions were all about outreach, not isolation; opening up, not shutting out.

Confused, still frightened, she walked on. Thankful to find herself still alone after one more pair of alcoves, and one more; coming closer to the end of the long room, no closer to any answer.

She felt a brief tug at her ankle, as though her trouser leg had snagged a thorn. Instinct moved her two ways, both at once: jerking her leg free, and twisting her head to look down, to see what she'd caught it against. Knowing already that there was nothing there, because for sure she would have seen it, she was being so careful, watching her path between the candles as warily as she watched the alcoves; dreading what that meant –
nothing there, seized by nothing, that absence that's been haunting me, dead baby
; she really didn't want to see, but she was looking anyway, by instinct or long training, that thing you do when something snags your clothing.

She looked down and no, there was nothing, except that one of the candles was guttering wildly, the one she'd just passed. Perhaps that sudden savage jerk of her leg – against what? she didn't know, couldn't answer, one more question – had stirred a current of air, enough to disturb the flame.

She watched it; it held her eye. She saw it draw back into its own shape for a moment, the flame rising from a wick, as it ought to. Stirred no more than any candle might be, burning on the floor of a surely-draughty room.

For a moment.

Then she saw it stretch into a new shape, a tiny arm, a doll's arm, with a doll's hand at the end of it: reaching, clutching. Stretching towards her, thin and fine and deadly.

She screamed, perhaps.

For a moment, on a breath.

And then scuttled back, surely out of its reach; and felt another little tug, and spun around, and so jerked her other leg free of the snatch of another of those flames, those arms, from the other side of the aisle.

Bent down and slapped her hand against smouldering wax-soaked fabric, heedless of the heat of it, until it wasn't smoking any more and there was just a scorched hole in her trouser hem. And then straightened slowly and stood, legs together and trembling now; and saw how the whole double line of candles up ahead had turned into a thicket of arms, like two hedges groping in time-lapse fast motion across the narrow space that divided them. Too narrow, she thought, that space, remembering Kathie and how the fiery hands had gripped her, how the girl had burned. These were nothing, minuscule by comparison, pencil-thin limbs and frail fingers trailing into wisps of smoke – but it only takes a spark to start a blaze. And she knew now how easily her clothes could catch; they were like wicks all ready for the flame. And she had a blister on her palm already; she couldn't go on using her bare hands to beat out incipient fires.

Nor could she just stand here, until the candles all burned down. She might – just – be safe now, this moment, cramped heel-and-toe between the two lines of candles, just out of reach of each; but her balance was uncertain already, she couldn't keep this up for hours. She'd wobble and have to step to one side or the other to save herself from falling. Have to step right into the reach of those seeking hands. And as the candles burned lower, their wicks would droop and lengthen, not burn fast enough away; the flames would strengthen and grow fatter, reach further . . .

She tried blowing one out, she did try. That was all Grace, tough-minded, taking action. She crouched down – carefully, carefully! – and steadied herself on one hand, bent low, blew hard.

Not hard enough. The flame guttered and flailed like a flag in the wind of her breath, but it didn't go out. And when she had to stop blowing, when she had to breathe, then it came snapping back like a whip, vigorous and vicious. It almost reached her, that time. She swayed back, almost into the clutch of another flame, another hand behind her.

They were working together, she thought.

Well, of course they were. Being worked, rather. There was one directing intelligence behind them, one antagonistic spirit. One mind, perhaps – except that that would mean magic, and she still didn't believe in magic any more than she believed in prayer. Even with hands of flame groping for her, the impossible turned all too real.

She believed in ghosts, absolutely. She believed in her dead baby, and the power of bells.

Somebody else believed in fire, she guessed: believed in some ghost of their own and the power of flames.

She thought she'd tripped over someone else's haunting here. Maybe Frank's. He believed in his own story about the woman burned long ago, even if the doctor and his wife had dismissed it. That might be enough; he might be right. For sure he was right about the house, that something lurked here. It had driven him mad. It might yet kill her. She hadn't – quite – bled to death, and they'd stopped ringing the bells that cut her; that might not be enough. She might have blundered into Frank's nightmare here. She might yet burn.

A flame licked at her foot. If she'd still been wearing nylons, they'd have melted on to her skin; plastic sandals would have done the same. These were rope-soled, hand-sewn. They might burn, but at least they wouldn't melt.

She'd burn first, she thought.

That gave her an idea: not a good one, maybe, but the best she had. The only one she had. Flames ahead of her, flames behind her; she couldn't run this gauntlet. Someone – something – had waited, she thought, until she was halfway down the aisle. Thoroughly trapped.

She couldn't jump to safety, either. Not from a standing start. The aisle was too wide.