Chill Page 5

  Father is … well, Father is Father.

  I respect him, but I keepe my distance.

  I’m learning to blend in to my surroundings. If I spend an hour a day with my head bent over my embroidry silks, then no one notices if I slip off into the woodes later with none to accompanie me.

  We have a privat world up ther, beyond the boating pond. The adults see naught of how I excel at shooting and riding, or how I canst beat the boys at their own games. I can yell and holler as much as I like up ther, fire off arrows that hit the mark a thousand times.

  I’m free when I’m up on the muir. As wild as my brothers. As long as Father sees naught.

  The twenty-first day of April 1708

  I want to write today about this new thing that has happend.

  A boy from the Lynns Farm has begun to come up to Dunadd to help with the horses. He’s about my age, but his mother has decided he’s old enough to be employed as a stable boy, when he is not helping out on their farm.

  Lynns Farm lies hidden amongst the trees in a hollow of the muir, not far from the waterfall.

  As soon as I saw him I knew we could be friends. But he would not respond at first. If anything he seemed angry with me for even trying. I said I should like to help him with the grooming, but he looked at me and laughed.

  “You?” he said, as if the idea amused him.

  “Why not?”

  He looked awkward at that.

  “It’s not really a task for ladies, if you see what I mean.”

  “Who says I am a lady?”

  He laughed again, and shrugged.

  Then he turned his back on me, and carried on with what he was doing. He was trying to ignore me, I culd tell. But I would not allow that.

  “I can ride any horse in this stable,” I told him. “Bareback,” I added.

  He nodded and said nothing. Unimpressd.

  The boy lives with his mother and brothers on the farm as our tenants. They rent the land from my father. Perhaps that explains his awkward behaviour towards me, but I am much offended that he should put up such barriers, walls to stop us communicating.

  “Why is it called the Lynns Farm?” I asked him then.

  He looked at me. “It’s from the Gaelic, Lin meaning waterfall? I wouldn’t expect thee to know that, of course,” he added.

  “Shall thee come up every day?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Can’t say.”

  I’ll look out for him, though.

  It’s lonely up at Dunadd. Douglas and James are not guid companie. They can turn vile if they’ve a mind to.

  I forgot to ask the stable-boy his name.

  The twenty-third day of April 1708

  I found out his name today. It is Patrick. And his familie name is MacFarlane. It suits him, I think, and I told him so.

  I also told him about the voices I sometimes hear. He looked at me oddly.

  “Thee wants to be careful, miss,” he murmured. “Thee dost not want to be taken for a witch.”

  I laughed. “That’s what my brothers think.” My eyes lit up. “It terrifies them. It’s a guid way of keeping them in their place. ‘I’ll put a spell on you,’ I tell them,” and I lift my arms to demonstrate to Patrick the trick I play on them. I can put the fear of God into my brothers with that little ploy.

  But Patrick did not seem amused. He carried on with his work. It does not seem as if he likes my brothers much. Who can blame him? He also can not understand why I should want to be friends with him.

  “Why dost thee come here?” he asked me.

  “I live here,” I retorted.

  “No,” he said. “I mean, why here?” He motioned his hand to the stable itself.

  I shrugged.

  “Company!”

  “Why wouldst thou seek my company?”

  “Why not?”

  “But we’re different, thee and I,” he pointed out. “Our families are different. You can read.”

  This seems to concern him far more than it concerns me. I turned away, hurt.

  “But I have no one else,” I said then. “I don’t have any friends of my own age. There’s just me … and my brothers.”

  I made as if to leave, but he stopped me.

  “Wait,” he called.

  I turned back.

  “I suppose thee couldst help a little,” he relented. “It’s mucky work though, for a girl. You’ll catch it if your ma sees.”

  “She won’t,” I said. “I’m very careful.”

  So we have become friends.

  The twelfth day of May 1708

  Life has brightened up since we became friends. When I’ve finished my sewing and bible study, and helped with the chores, I go outside to find Patrick. In the dark sweet-smelling warmth of the stable, we groom the horses together, and tell stories and talk. He listens to me as if I have something important to say. (At home I am mostly ignored, and ridiculed by my brothers if I dare to offer an opinion). The stable smells of hay and leather and freshly-ridden horses, and I love it. No one can see us as we talk in the shadows. And for now, no one notices what I do. I’m still too young for them to trouble with much. That will not always be the case, I know. There will come a time when things will be expected of me. Lady-like things. But I am practising the art of becoming invisible.

  Sometimes, when Patrick has finished his work, we wander off onto the muir. I’ve shown him the boating pond at the top of Glentye, and he has shown me the waterfall near his mother’s farmhouse.

  These little exchanges are the currency of friendship, I told him.

  “Big words,” he said to me. “Those are big words thou uses. Thou ‘rt becoming a proper lady.”

  “I’m not a lady yet,” I reminded him.

  The fourteenth day of June 1708

  I do not want to think about what happend today. Life has been so perfect, full of interest. I am not lonely any more. I always look forward to seeing Patrick.

  But today my brothers cast a shadow over that, as they do over iverething nowadays. They always have the last say. Father listens to them. It’s a sad thing to say about one’s own brothers, but there is an element of cruelty in them. My mother, Lady Cecilia, dotes on them and they have been raised to issue orders, to give commands, not receive them. I am afraid it has not been good for them in the end. We were up at the boating pond, Patrick and I. We were walking along, idling I suppose, when Douglas and James appeard from nowhere. They had been hiding in the woodes, and watching us. They towered over Patrick, crowded round him.

  “What is this?” James sneered. “Our little sister with a stable-hand?”

  James put his face up close to Patrick’s then. “Our father doesn’t pay you to idle around in his daughter’s company.”

  “I’ve finished my chores for the day,” Patrick responded, to which James, angry now, seized my new friend by his shirt.

  “James, stop it,” I cried, and pulled him off.

  Patrick glared at my brother as if he wud floor him with a single blow, but he did not raise his fists.

  James turned to me then. “If father gets to hear how thee has spent thy time, and what sort of company thou keeps” he hissed “thou shalt be punished as he sees fit.”

  He didn’t need to finish his sentence. I knew how Father wud punish me.

  After they’d gone and left us alone, Patrick’s face seemed to close over.

  “Your brother’s right,” he told me. “Thou shouldst be getting back.”

  He looked resigned, as if life was turning out only as one would expect.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “There’s no sense in thee coming to the stables any more.”

  “But we’re friends,” I told him.

  “No, we’re not,” he murmured. “You’re the daughter of Sir Charles, and I’m a stable boy.”

  He would not look at me at first. He meant what he said. There is a stubbornness about him that I have observed before.

  “Thou art my only friend,” I said
.

  His glance flickered up at me for a moment, then he was silent. He turned away from me and began to walk down the hill, towards the white turrets of Dunadd.

  He left me ther without a backward glance. I have found a friend, only to lose him again. The only real friend I have ever had. I shall visit him tomorrow in the stables, just the same.

  The fifteenth day of June 1708

  I have taken to locking up my journal in the ebony box in my room, just in case anyone shud decide to pry. The key I have hidden away so that no one will ever find it. The ebony box is where I kepe my treasures, things that are precious to me, although of little or no value to anyone else. I am sure that in the future my ebony box will prove useful. I shall store my most important secrets in it, and one day I shall hope to be buried with that box in my grave. Oh dear, “what a morbid thought” Mrs Fletcher wud say, “for one so young!” I am not supposed to have secrets, but already I have one or two. Enough to require a box with a key.

  I went to the stables where he was working this morning, but he would not look at me. He refused to speak or meet my eye. I tried to talk to him, but I have met with a solid wall of silence. So I left again. Up in my room at the top of the tower I have been hearing the voices of the boy and girl again. They squabble and fight, keeping me awake in the early hours, and when I look for them in the darkness, my candle picks out only shadows, the bulk of my own furniture, the bed, the table, the chest under the window. Nothing else. But I can hear them as plain as day.

  Who are they? What happened to them?

  I remember Patrick’s words to me. “Be careful they don’t take thee for a witch.”

  People are ignorant. Men burn witches if they’ve nothing better to do. In a village a few miles distant, they burnt a young girl only the other month. She’d been cursing the men in the village, they say, and when three of them died of the plague, she was held responsible.

  My brothers would never accuse me. Witches are not usually from families of wealth and influence like mine, or people who are expected to spend their days sewing by candlelight. They are people with work-reddened hands, who work as Patrick works.

  Here the diary entries stopped. Fiona and Samuel lifted their heads and stared at each other.

  “What have we found?” he whispered.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” Fiona hissed. “It has to be.”

  A portrait of a lonely young girl had emerged, growing up isolated at Dunadd, and unable to fulfil her true potential. It was a tantalizing glimpse. The two children burned with excitement and frustration. They wanted to know more of her story, what happened to her afterwards. So many questions jostled inside their heads until they felt they would burst if they didn’t find the answers. It was as if she had left behind a trail of clues for them to find; traces of herself.

  “Patrick MacFarlane of Lynns Farm,” Fiona breathed. “It’s the same name.”

  “Where’s the rest of the journal?” Samuel said. “There has to be more.”

  Fiona shook her head. “This is all there is.”

  Leaving the delicate papers inside Samuel’s desk for sake keeping, they made their way back to the big house and resolved to finish their job up in the attic.

  “It’ll be a good excuse,” Samuel said. “We can keep looking for the rest of the journal.”

  They clambered back up the narrow ladder to the mouth of the attic, and shone the torch into the darkness. Fiona nudged Samuel and pointed.

  “Look at that!” she said.

  “What?”

  She directed the long finger of light at the trunk underneath the eaves where they’d found the journal. Long curtains of cobwebs hung down from the rafters, and they moved these aside to step closer. There was an air of total neglect about this attic. No one had been up here in years.

  “Did you close the lid?” she hissed.

  Samuel looked at the trunk. Its lid was now firmly shut. “I don’t think so,” he responded.

  “Then who did?”

  They moved towards the chest, and opened it. Inside, all the embroidered linen which had been spilling from its belly, and muddled up in their excitement over finding the papers, was neatly folded. So neat, so perfect, it was as if the objects inside had been carefully starched and ironed. As if the children had never touched them, never been there.

  “This isn’t how we left it,” Fiona murmured, shining the torch into the shadows.

  “No.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Not till we’ve checked it again,” Samuel insisted. He dipped his hand back into the chest.

  “Samuel?” Fiona cried.

  He searched frantically, but there was nothing else in there, no crackling of papers to indicate more of what they’d already found. Catherine Morton’s journal was incomplete.

  “This is useless,” Samuel said.

  “We have to go,” Fiona begged him. “I’m not staying up here another minute.”

  Reluctantly, they left the attic behind.

  “Did you manage to sort out some jumble?” Mrs Morton asked her daughter as they made their way to the kitchen.

  “Sort of,” she murmured. “There are a few bin bags full.”

  “Well, at least we’ve made a start. We can take it to the Charity Shop … if we ever get out of here alive,” she added gloomily.

  Footsteps in the Library

  Charles sat in his room that night, in the dark, listening to the sounds of the house. Outside the hills were silent and black. Other people wondered if they found it spooky living on Sheriffmuir. Everyone knew that a battle had been fought here in 1715 and that ghosts were said to haunt the nearby forests, but it wasn’t spooky. Not really. It was their own private wilderness.

  In the seclusion of his tower room, Charles took out the letter that he’d found in his father’s desk, and spread it out on his pillow.

  It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, but it voiced his father’s concerns and was dated the day he died.

  I don’t know why, but I have this feeling that something terrible is about to happen. I sit here in the familiarity of the library as I write this, a room I’ve always loved. There are things I find difficult to explain, to put into words. I’ve always been a rational sort of person, logical, exact. The truth is, this is a very old and atmospheric house; a building of one sort or another has stood on this site for centuries, so it’s hardly surprising if strange whisperings from the past should persist and filter through. I’ve always maintained that no matter what strange occurrences should take place here in this house, there must be a scientific explanation for them. I don’t hold with notions of ghosts and spirits.

  However, I wish I could dismiss what I have been hearing over the years so easily. For years, since just before the children were born, I’ve been haunted by the sound of a weeping woman. She comes to me in my dreams, whispering dark threats. And if I’m in this room, with its long cool shadows, I hear her cross the drawing room floor towards the library, slowly pacing, wringing her hands and weeping. She has repeated this ritual for years, never leaving me in peace, taunting me. I give no credence to these nightly sounds. It’s just my own imagination, I tell myself, but inside I know better. I am afraid. Mortally afraid. And I can’t describe this fear to anyone, or they would think I’ve gone mad. Perhaps I have …

  I have these premonitions of disaster. If she appears to me in person I don’t know what I will do. I don’t know how I will face her; she inspires such terror in me. All I can do is hope and pray … and wait for what I know is inevitable …

  The letter was signed Daniel Morton.

  Charles read it through once, twice, then lay on his back in the moonlight, staring up at the ceiling.

  Part of him longed to go next door and confide in his brother Seb, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t want to admit that the same thing was happening to him as had happened to his father before him. He knew what his father meant when he wrote that letter. With some deep par
t of himself, he understood.

  He also knew that Fiona and Samuel were trying to find out too. By day he watched them like a hawk. He listened at doors, studied them as they walked alone in the gardens below. How much did they know, he wondered?

  The following afternoon when his mother suggested they all go skiing again to lift their spirits, and Fiona backed out of it, claiming she was too tired, Charles watched his sister making her excuses.

  As he set off with Sebastian and his mother through the snow, he glanced back at the house uneasily, wondering what the other two would be doing in their absence. He was half-tempted to linger, to double-back and take them by surprise. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. The forest either side of him looked ghostly in the freezing light, mist caught in pockets of darkness where the branches met. He longed to turn back, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it, and he was forced to go on.

  He was right, of course. Fiona and Samuel had been waiting for an opportunity to explore the library when the house was empty, and now it had come. Granny and her husband were both occupied in other parts of the house, and Isabel was working in her studio. They knew they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  Samuel turned to Fiona once the house had fallen silent. “Right. Now’s our chance.”

  They watched from one of the windows to make sure the others had left.

  Fiona didn’t feel optimistic about finding the rest of the journal. “Why would those few pages have been torn out? The rest of it must have been destroyed.”

  “We don’t know that,” Samuel said.

  Fiona led the way into the dark hallway, past the grandfather clock and up the spiralling staircase. She was used to the huge old farmhouse with its turrets and tower and complicated eaves, but even she was beginning to feel a little nervous creeping around it like a couple of detectives.

  In the drawing room the curtains at the big windows were drawn back.

  “I love that view,” Samuel murmured, taking a breath as he walked towards it.