Chill Page 6

  “So do I,” Fiona said. They were so high up here that often, when the valley below was filled with mist or rain, they sailed above it all, the sun breaking through. There was a feeling of elation then, as if they really were on top of the world.

  “I used to have a great view in Edinburgh too. I could see the Castle from my room, all lit up at night like something out of a fairytale.”

  There was a pause and Fiona said, “I wonder if she loved it too.”

  “Who?”

  “Catherine Morton.”

  As they stood at the window, looking at the moor, Samuel tried to make out the rooftops of Lynns Farm below.

  “You can’t see it from here,” Fiona told him. “Too many trees.”

  “Your mother really worries about you going near that place, doesn’t she?”

  Fiona nodded. “It’s another of her weird rules. We’re not allowed to go there, that’s all.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “I told you, a grumpy old man lives there.”

  “With the same name as Patrick MacFarlane in the journal?”

  “I know. Weird, isn’t it? Mum doesn’t get on with him for some reason.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t like our dogs wandering about. Who knows? Anyway, you heard what Charles said. He’s supposed to be a bit of a weirdo.”

  “In what way?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. No one actually says!”

  They walked steadily across the polished floorboards towards the library. Fiona went first, and pushed it open.

  They stepped inside, peering nervously into the shadows.

  Everything was exactly as they had seen it before, dust and cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, Fiona’s father’s things laid out carefully on the green leather-topped desk, untouched, just as if he was about to reappear and take up his place again, doing whatever it was he was doing the day he died. It seemed to Samuel there was a heavy atmosphere in this room, some kind of tension or energy.

  “Now what?” Fiona whispered.

  He caught her eye. “We start looking, that’s what!”

  Their voices sounded loud in the silence, and they glanced nervously over their shoulders.

  Fiona pulled a crimson velvet footstool towards her, and sat down. Samuel was too intrigued to sit. He touched the spine of an old book with faded gold lettering embossed on its leather cover. “She said in the diary that it was a leather-bound volume,” he murmured. “We need to check every book on these shelves until we’re sure it isn’t here.”

  They decided to take a wall each, and work through the books methodically.

  “I don’t trust Charles,” Fiona whispered after a while, listening out for any sound in the corridor beyond. “He knows we’re up to something.”

  “What if he comes back unexpectedly?” she added.

  “We’ll worry about that if it happens,” Samuel said. To begin with they were quite hopeful. There were so many old volumes here, and every one that they slid from its place on the dusty shelves seemed like a distinct possibility. However, each time they inspected a book, they replaced it, disappointed. Catherine’s journal was proving very elusive.

  “This is going to take hours,” Fiona sighed, gazing up at the ranks of books towering above her.

  Samuel knew that too, but was trying not to despair. He didn’t want to give in so easily. What had seemed such a good idea when they started out was turning into a mammoth task. He’d been so certain they’d find something. It was too painful to give up now.

  “We’ll just have to come back when we can, and keep looking,” he murmured.

  “How can we do that? The house is never empty like this. Not with all of us snowed in together, driving each other batty.”

  “We can come back at night, when everyone’s asleep.”

  Fiona couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “You are joking, aren’t you?”

  But she could tell from the look on his face that he meant it. He was deadly serious.

  “You’re mad,” she whispered. “Think of the risk!”

  He shrugged and avoided her eye. “It’s worth it.” He bent his head and continued to search, slipping book after book from the shelf. One by one he looked at them, blowing the dust off their covers, then slid them back into place. It was clear these books hadn’t been touched in years.

  “Granny Hughes doesn’t like dusting in here on her own when she knows the rest of the house is empty, so the library doesn’t always get cleaned,” Fiona pointed out. “She has a thing about the library, she won’t go near it unless she has to.”

  “Everyone seems to have a thing about the library.”

  They searched on in silence. The hours passed and it didn’t look as if they would ever find the rest of Catherine Morton’s journal amongst the neglected books of her father’s old library. They would never find out what happened to her and Patrick.

  “Her diary is nearly three hundred years old, after all,” Fiona said. “Why would it be sitting in the library, waiting for us to find it? It’s much more likely to have been destroyed or lost.”

  “Then why did someone tear out the opening pages and keep them?”

  “Who knows?”

  As they were preparing to give up, Samuel leant against the bookcase and his gaze travelled upwards. His eye came to rest on a dark carved wooden box on top of a glass-fronted bookcase. It rang a bell for some reason, although he didn’t know why. It looked very old and covered in cobwebs. “I wonder what’s in there?” he murmured.

  She followed his gaze. “I don’t know.” There were so many old things lying around the place that had been there for centuries that nothing stood out as far as Fiona was concerned. But she stopped suddenly in mid-sentence. They both heard it – a sound just outside the door, the light tread of footsteps crossing the drawing room towards them. Fiona put a finger to her lips. “Shh!” she hissed. “Listen.”

  They sat perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe, as the footsteps came nearer.

  Suddenly Samuel let out a gasp. “She mentioned it!”

  “What? Sssh? Be quiet!”

  But Samuel wouldn’t be silenced, in spite of whatever or whoever was waiting for them outside the door.

  “She mentioned it in her journal. It’s the ebony box – it’s black like piano keys!” and he pointed up at the dusty old box sitting on the very top of the highest bookcase.

  They stared at each other, speechless. Then the slow pacing stopped, and there was a terrible moment of suspense when Samuel and Fiona felt sure the intruder would open the door to the library and find them there. They kept very still, waiting for the door to open. At last, without warning, the footsteps began to recede.

  They both let out a sigh.

  “It was probably just Granny,” Fiona whispered.

  “It didn’t sound much like her.”

  Samuel rose unsteadily to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” Fiona cried, in a hoarse whisper.

  “To see who it is.”

  “You can’t.”

  But Samuel wasn’t listening. “I’ll be all right,” he hissed, and crept towards the door. He opened it a fraction, his heart stopping. He felt sure it was just someone trying to scare them, Charles perhaps. He pushed the door gently. It swung open on its hinges with an eerie whine, and the huge drawing room lay empty before him.

  There was no one else about.

  He walked slowly across the length of the room towards the door at the far end, tiptoeing quietly. Just as he reached the door, it suddenly swung open in his face and he let out a short cry. There was a loud scream, and it was a moment or two before he realized that his own mother was standing before him, her face white with shock.

  “Samuel, you scared the life out of me,” she gasped. “What on earth are you doing creeping about like this?”

  Fiona appeared behind him looking sheepish. “We were just looking for a book I’d l
ost.”

  Isabel Cunningham held a hand to her pounding heart and leant against the door-frame. “I’ve just been giving myself the creeps, stalking about the empty house like this. I was worried about you. Wondered where you’d got to.”

  “Sorry, Mum,” Samuel said, and tried very hard not to snigger.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Isabel put the kettle on the Aga for some tea. “I promised your mother I’d let the dogs out and keep an eye on you,” she said.

  “I don’t need looking after. I can look after myself,” Fiona retorted.

  “Even so, young lady, when we’ve had some tea, you two can take the dogs out for some exercise.”

  “What are you going to do?” Samuel asked his mother.

  “I’ve got work to do,” Isabel replied shortly. And he knew that meant her sculpture. She would be busy with it all afternoon, until the cold drove her from her workshop.

  As they drank their tea Samuel thought of the ebony box lying in the library, almost inaccessible. He was desperate to inspect it, but Fiona warned him that her mother and the boys would be back at any time. “We don’t have time,” she said. “If she catches us …” And he knew she was right.

  They retreated to Samuel’s room in the cottage instead, and carefully unearthed the remains of the journal from his desk.

  He scanned the fragile papers and found the paragraph he was looking for. They read it out loud.

  I’ve 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 keepe 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.

  “A box with a key!” Samuel murmured.

  “Well,” Fiona said, smoothing out the crackling papers, “she certainly wasn’t buried with it, as she wished.”

  “We have to get back in the library. I want to know what’s inside that box. As she says herself, boxes hold secrets sometimes. I bet we’ll find the rest of the journal in there!”

  “How can we?” she sighed. “When will we have another chance like this one? The others will be back soon.”

  But Samuel had fallen mysteriously quiet, his eyes gleaming.

  “Like I said, we’ll go back at night, when everyone’s asleep.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Oh yes, I can,” he said.

  And she knew with a horrible sinking feeling that he meant it.

  Trouble

  Charles and his brother Sebastian set off through the snow the next morning, into the woods above Dunadd. They wanted to be alone. Usually Fiona would have tagged along with them as well, but she seemed too busy these days.

  “She’s more interested in that boy from the cottage than us,” Charles mumbled.

  Sebastian cast his brother a sideways glance. “That boy has a name, you know. Anyway, I thought you were always glad to get rid of her? Not liking to be pestered by a kid sister, that sort of thing.”

  Charles said nothing.

  The snow was deep and they had to work hard to make their way uphill past the boating pond, which had completely frozen over. The stones around the edge were capped with glass, and the black reeds were caught in it too. The little blue rowing-boat at the end of the jetty was trapped in the ice as if it would never break free again. Their feet scrunched on dry snow.

  “I’m just trying to protect her,” Charles muttered.

  “Protect her?” Sebastian cried. “Well, there’s a first! What from, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Things have been weird lately, that’s all.”

  Everything was white and glistening, sculpted and chiselled into strange shapes, but Charles was too preoccupied to appreciate the magic of it.

  “You worry about things too much,” Sebastian pointed out. “It’s all this snow. It’s getting to you, being stuck on the moor like this.”

  If only you knew, Charles thought but didn’t say a word. Sometimes the burden of his father’s letter felt too heavy to carry all on his own.

  Sebastian ran ahead and threw a long spear-like stick into the forest, crying “Normal life will resume shortly.” Then he spun round to face his brother. “We hope.”

  Back at Dunadd, Isabel Cunningham stood in the middle of her workshop, and surveyed the scene before her. Scattered across the workbenches were the “instruments of her trade” as she called them, bits of wire, the bottoms of green glass bottles, multi-coloured beads and shiny pieces of material. Since moving to Sheriffmuir she had been very inspired, and felt that she had produced her best work. Her latest masterpiece was a garden ornament; a huge spider’s web made from wire coathangers and old spectacle lenses. It was designed to hang in the branches of a tree, where it could catch the sunlight and sparkle like an enormous version of the real thing. It was a wintry piece to match the mood of Sheriffmuir at that moment.

  She lifted her head and peered out of the small dirty pane of glass that served for a window. She still had her doubts about bringing Samuel here to live, the isolation for instance, but it was more than she could have hoped for, and Samuel had actually made friends with Fiona. They seemed to be spending an awful lot of time together. Something was really engaging them. Whatever it was, she thought it could only be a good thing. And once the snowdrifts disappeared the children would be able to go to school at last, and Samuel would make more friends. She had only to wait patiently, she decided. She lifted her coffee mug to her lips, and smiled contentedly.

  Samuel went over to the window, opened the lid of his desk and took out the papers torn from Catherine Morton’s journal. He looked at them closely, turning the delicate pages over in his hand. Catherine Morton was the Weeping Woman, he felt sure of it. She had written these as a child. It was a glimpse into a life shrouded in mystery.

  If the evidence of her diary was anything to go by, she had been a spirited and intelligent twelve-year-old. What had happened to her in the end? What had transformed her into the Weeping Woman?

  He replaced the papers in his desk, and looked up. It was snowing again. Big flakes fell out of the sky. Samuel thought that Granny Hughes must be wondering if she would ever see her centrally-heated flat again.

  Samuel was still making his plans. He intended to visit the library when everyone was asleep. Pulling on his boots he went next door to find Fiona. The kitchen was empty, and when he called out her name, no one answered. Before he knew it, he was heading past the grandfather clock, and up the spiralling staircase to the drawing room on the first floor, drawn by the thought of the ebony box. He called out her name, but again no one answered.

  On the threshold to the library he hesitated. It was so tempting, to step into that forbidden room, and reach the box on his own, while no one was looking. There was certainly no one about; the whole house was eerily quiet.

  He took one step forward, and then someone spoke his name.

  “Samuel!”

  The colour drained from his face. It was Mrs Morton.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for Fiona,” he mumbled.

  “You won’t find her in there.”

  She watched him as he retreated back the way he’d come, blushing to the roots of his hair.

  “She’s gone out on Emperor, I think,” Mrs Morton added. “Although she won’t get far on a pony in this weather.”

  At the boating pond there was no sign of Fiona, but he could see tracks leading around the edge of it, and into the woods beyond. The forest was very dark and quiet, an enclosed world full of shadows and shifting shapes, but something drew him in. He followed the hoof prints.

  He became aware
of a path beneath his feet as it wound through the dense undergrowth.

  Ahead of him was a narrow clearing, with a huge standing stone at the end of it. The snow had drifted up against the side of it as it stood monumental and half-forgotten.

  He walked up to it, brushed the snow aside and laid a hand on its cold pitted surface.

  Behind the stone he saw another path leading through the trees. There was an eerie atmosphere here and he felt nervous. After a while he suddenly burst out into the open. He stood still and gazed. Before him was a massive clearing surrounded by tall trees. In one of the treetops was an elaborate professional-looking tree house, built from timber and thatch, reached by a long ladder. The snow in the clearing was full of tracks, and a wisp of grey smoke drifted from an abandoned campfire. Samuel gazed about him, intrigued.

  Suddenly something whizzed past his left ear and embedded itself in the trunk of a pine behind him. He turned and saw an arrow vibrating where it had landed. Charles and Sebastian stepped out from behind the trees.

  Samuel rolled his eyes. “Might have known it was you!” Grasping the arrow, he wrenched it out from the tree and inspected its tip. “That could do some serious damage, you know!”

  “It was supposed to,” Charles said. “What are you doing up here?”

  “Looking for Fiona.” It was the second time he’d repeated that today, and so far things didn’t seem to be going well.

  “She’s not here.”

  “So I see.”

  “Anyway, I thought she’s usually hanging out with you these days,” Charles pointed out. “Doesn’t have time for us any more.”

  Samuel shrugged.

  Charles eyed him suspiciously, his dark eyes unnervingly like those Samuel had seen glaring at him in the mirror on Christmas Day.

  “Were you following us?” He challenged Samuel. “Because I’m warning you …” he struggled for a moment, at a loss for words. “I’m getting fed up with all this snooping around. You and Fiona are up to something, I know it.”

  Samuel said nothing, but Charles hadn’t finished yet.