The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall (9 page)

The girl's words are like a slap to my face. This is different. Wildly, madly different. This really isn't some mirage in my mind. I'm looking directly into the eyes of a living, breathing girl from another time, another version of Wilderwood Hall – and she's looking directly back into mine.

“You can … you can see me?” I mumble, tripping over my words.

“Aye, but why is it that I can see you and others cannot?” says Flora.

Her chest is heaving, as if there's a bird locked and frightened inside of it, fluttering and trying to fly free.

“
I don't know, but please don't be scared,” I tell her, holding my hands up imploringly.

She clasps a hand to her chest and looks ready to run.

“Actually, right now, I'm a bit scared too,” I add, hoping it makes her feel better.

My honesty makes her pause at least. She looks me up and down, her eyes widening, scandalized by my lack of skirt I'm sure. Wherever and whenever I am, to a girl like Flora, leggings must seem like I'm walking around next to naked.

“What are you?” she demands. “Some kind of selkie?”

“A selkie?” I say, wondering if it's some kind of Scottish slang for an English person. “What is that?”

“A beastie that once was a seal. That rises from the sea and takes on human form,” Flora jabbers on, sounding panicked. “You
are
a selkie, I know it! My grandmother herself said she saw them when she was a girl growing up in Oban. She said she went down to the shore and played with them. No one ever believed her stories but me.”

The girl's eyes are huge in her gaunt face, fear only a scream away, I worry. Oh, but she
mustn't
scream
– or I'm likely to scream too, and I don't know
who
that might alert. The fierce housekeeper or someone else from this
older
Wilderwood? The possibility of that makes me deeply uneasy.

“I'm not a … a seal or a selkie,” I tell Flora quickly. “I'm just a normal girl.”

“I think you are
not,
miss,” she announces. “You – you may seem it now, as you are, but earlier you were the strangest thing to me. A haze that became a figure and then faded to nothing. You appeared and were gone so quickly that I could not trust my own eyes!”

And now I know for sure: I didn't just imagine being on the beautifully furnished first-floor landing this morning, any more than I imagined the noise and steam and clatter of the busy kitchen a few minutes ago. And I'm definitely not imagining the terrified girl standing staring only inches away from me.

“So you did see me this morning?” I ask her. “When you were hiding in that room, or store cupboard, or whatever it is…”

“In my closet, you mean?” asks Flora.

“Your closet?” I repeat, wishing I knew more about whatever era I've slipped into. Perhaps “closet”
meant
something different to a cupboard back then. “Do you …
live
in there?”

Flora suddenly does something I don't expect, and I don't suppose she does either.

She bursts out laughing.

But just as quickly, she reigns in the smiles and glances around alarmed at the French doors at the front of the house. Flora's worried, I suppose, that she might be discovered. I don't suppose the wealthy family who own the house would want their staff enjoying the fountain or any other part of the estate that wasn't strictly the servants' domain.

“Of course not!” she says, answering my question now in a voice not much louder than a whisper. “The closet is where I keep the coal for the fires and empty the chamber pots.”

Flora wrinkles her nose as she speaks.

“You're a maid,” I state, more for my own sake than hers. I'm sure Flora is all too certain of her role.

“My name is Flora,” she informs me, though she's still sounding wary. “I am the under-housemaid here at Wilderwood.”

“My name is Ellis,” I tell her in reply. “I live here now.”

Flora's
face drops and her mouth hangs open. My truth is too far-fetched for her.

“You do not!” snaps Flora, taken aback by my clearly false statement. “You are no guest of the master and mistress.
I
would know.”

Flora
would
know, I suppose, because she'd be cleaning out my chamber pot, if that was the case.

“Oh, but I don't live in the main house,” I begin to
try
to explain, knowing it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, since I have no words to explain to
myself
what's happening. “I mean, me and my mother, we're staying up
there
,” I say, pointing to the first floor of the East Wing.

“No, no!” Flora answers back, shaking her head fervently, which frees more curls. “That is the servants' quarters. Only Mrs Strachan has her rooms there, along with Miss Matilda and Jean and Ann and Minnie and me.”

All these names … who are these women and girls? I only recognize the governess's name. And back in the kitchen there was mention of Mrs Wallace (the cook? The small, round woman bashing the bread dough?) and someone called Catriona. Where do
they
sleep, I wonder? And what about the male servants that I saw in the photo in the café?

In
the crazed whirl of confusion and questions crowding my mind, something suddenly occurs to me, and I have an instant, burning desire to know the answer to one particular question.

“Which room is yours?” I ask, wondering, hoping against hope that it's the same as mine. Somehow that might make some strange kind of sense of all this.

“You see the one closest? With the gable?” says Flora.

Yes, yes, it IS mine!
I think to myself.

“It's across the hall from there. I bunk up with Minnie.”

Oh … so Flora sleeps – or at least once slept – in the cobweb-curtained room where our futon is currently dumped, I realize with disappointment. Hey, maybe I love coincidences as much as Mum does, and
that's
why me and Flora “sharing” a room seemed to matter for a second there.

Hold on…

As Mum flutters into my consciousness, I feel the familiar ripple and roll of anxiety. Me being here, properly here with Flora, talking to her … what does that mean? I'm not here for good, am I? I can go back to my time – can't I?

“
Wait!” Flora bursts into my panicked thoughts. “Are
you
the shadow that comes in my sleep?”

“What?” I reply, lost with her mentions of selkies and shadows, as well as my own sudden worries.

“I have been having the strangest dreams,” Flora carries on, her voice getting louder as her excitement builds. “I turn a corner and see a glimpse of a shadow … and then it is gone. Is that you?”

“Me? No!” I say, shaking my head.

All of a sudden, I feel a sharp longing for Mum, now that everything is becoming more unsettling and bizarre.

“Wait! I know it now,” gasps Flora, her thin hand at her mouth in shock. “In her village, the people said my grandmother was a seer … I must be like her! I have had the dreams, and now here you are like an apparition before me. I have inherited her talent, have I not?”

A seer. That's like a wise woman, isn't it? Someone with supernatural powers…

Oh, please, please let me get back to Mum
, I wordlessly plead, as shivers get the better of me.

And as I picture Mum's sweet smile and the pink tips of her blonde hair, I feel something. A kind
of
tug at my back. As if someone is yanking at my jumper, trying to get my attention.

“Oh, we'd better go – quick!” I hear Flora say urgently, and see her leap from the fountain's edge at the sound of a rattle and clank. She holds out her hand to me, but in the space of time between me looking towards the source of the noise – one of the French doors being pushed open on to the terrace – and back again, Flora is gone. And so is the tugging sensation.

Where Flora stood, there's nothing but a leftover autumn leaf blowing by in the spring winds. It lands not on water, but in the tangle of ivy that covers and smothers the fountain.

Relief runs warm through my veins. I can dip in to Flora's world and come safely back to mine. It makes me want to find her quickly, to make sure she's OK and not in any trouble…

“All right?” Mr Fraser interrupts my thoughts, as he steps out on to the moss-covered terrace and spots me standing stock-still and open-mouthed. I must look like someone who's trying to remember where they've left their mind.

“Mmm,” I mumble uselessly, then turn to go, aiming myself away from the builder and towards the back door.

Unfortunately,
I also aim myself directly into Cam, stepping on
both
his feet.

“Oof!” he gasps. The two sheepdogs at his side start barking excitedly, like it's some kind of game.

It's not a game, and it was just an accident. A normal reaction would be to say sorry and move on. But I've had plenty of experience of boys (and girls) braying at me at my old school, where saying sorry just got drowned out in all the cruel laughter and teasing.

And apart from that, life doesn't feel very normal right now. So “sorry” is not what I come out with. Nowhere near.

“Why are you here again?” I snap at Cam, sounding a lot angrier than I mean to.

Cam looks at me with his scanning blackbird eyes, as if he's trying to work out what my problem is, or squirrel his way into my thoughts or something. Bet he's loving this; some giraffe-sized, gangly girl making a fool of herself in front of him, for the second time today.

“Dad texted me to say he forgot this,” Cam says calmly, holding up a tool that I think might be a widget or a wrench or very possibly
neither
of these things because I don't know what I'm talking about and I'm
beside
myself with embarrassment.

“
Oh, OK. Fine, then,” I answer stupidly, flicking my hand away from a nosy dog's tongue that's just licked there.

Then just as I try to hang on to the faintest scrap of dignity and move away, I see one of those tiny split-second twinkles of light in the corner of my eye. Cam turns in the direction of it – he must've spotted it too.

“What was that?” he asks, frowning in the direction of the bushes down by the open entrance to Wilderwood.

I don't know if the sparkles of light I've seen today have anything to do with Flora and what's been happening to me, but I know that it's none of this stranger's business.

“What was what? I didn't see anything,” I snipped at Cam, then stomp off to see what's happening inside the house with Mum, with Eloise, or very possibly the past…

Wandering this way and that, drifting from room to room…

For quite a while I searched the main house for Flora, hoping I might touch some tattered piece of wallpaper and hear a whisper to guide me to her. Hoping I might turn some random corner and stumble across her hurrying about her duties. But perhaps Mr Fraser's banging and crashing in
this
Wilderwood stopped me tuning in to the other, older version of the Hall.

Finally I gave up on finding Flora and headed here, to the servants' quarters, keeping my fingers crossed that Mum and Eloise will be done with their cosy, private little chat. But they're not.

Hovering
outside Mum's office, I hold my breath, trying to catch some of the conversation.

Not that I'm used to it, but I can't hear Eloise's voice; only Mum's.
Her
voice is saying stilted “yes, but”s and “no, but”s mostly, with long silences in between. She must be on the phone. Talking to RJ? I don't think so … Mum would sound happier, surely.

“Look, her dad will want her back at school too, but—”

Mum is silent again, as the person at the other end interrupts.

I wonder what this is about; won't Eloise be off for the holidays anyway? Or do private schools and boarding schools have different term times from regular ones?

“Yes, Beth, but—”

Mum just called the other person “Beth”. Of course; that's the name of RJ's ex-wife, Eloise's mum. Is she flipping out? Didn't she know that Eloise was planning to come here? Maybe she thought Eloise was hard at work at her fancy boarding school in wherever, and not travelling up the west coast of the country on a train bound for Scotland…

The sudden creak of a chair from inside makes me leap away from the door as if it had turned
burning
hot. The last thing I want to do is be caught eavesdropping, either by Mum or, especially, by Eloise. I'm not exactly keen to face that dead-eyed glower. And so I hurry into my own room, pushing the door shut as silently as I can behind me.

Letting out a long, slow breath, I walk over to the two windows of my bedroom and gaze out across the grounds and treetops, towards the village in the distance. I'm facing east, of course, but right now my heart yearns for the south. For faraway London. For a friendly voice from home.