The Woman In The Mirror: A haunting gothic story of obsession, tinged with suspense. Rebecca James

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СКАЧАТЬ see a thing. All you’ve got to go on is the sound of the sea, but if you lose your bearings with that, one wrong step and you’re gone. Winterbourne’s right on the bluff. Some people say it’s the second lighthouse at Polcreath.’

      ‘How long have you worked for the captain?’

      ‘Since before the war. I knew him when he was a…different sort of person. The war changed people, didn’t it? Just because you have a title, or a place like Winterbourne, it doesn’t spare you. He was hurt in France; it’s been hard for him, an able-bodied man like that suddenly made a cripple. Did the war change you, miss?’

      I focus on the horizon, an expanse of steel coming ever closer, and concentrate on the clean line of it so intently that I can’t think of anything else. ‘Of course.’

      ‘Between you and me, I could likely find better-paid employment elsewhere, but I’ve got loyalty for Winterbourne, and for the captain. My mother used to say that you’re nothing without your friends. The captain would never say I was a friend, but he doesn’t say a lot of things that he might really mean.’

      ‘How tragic that he lost his wife.’

      ‘Indeed, miss.’ There’s a laden silence. ‘But we don’t speak about that.’

      I sit back. I had hoped that Tom’s loquaciousness might lend itself to a confidence, but seemingly not on this matter. Two people now have refused to speak to me about the former woman of the house. What happened to her?

      I am expecting us to come across the Hall suddenly, to catch a quick glimpse of it between trees or to swing abruptly through the park gates, but instead I spot it first as a ragged smudge on the hill. That’s how it appears – as an inkblot the size of my thumb, spilled in water, its edges seeming to fall away or dissolve into air. There is something about its position, elevated and alone, that reminds me of a fortress in a storybook, or of a drawing of a haunted house, its black silhouette set starkly against the deepening orange of the sky. As we approach, I begin to make out its features. To say that Winterbourne is an extreme-looking house would be an understatement.

      It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic façade. The place instantly brings to mind an imposing religious house – a Parisian cathedral, perhaps, decorated with gaping arches and delicate spires. Turrets thrust skyward, and to the east the blunt teeth of a battlement crown remind me of a game of chess. Plunging gargoyles are laced around its many necks, long and thin, jutting, as if leaping from the building’s skin. Lancet windows, too many to count, adorn the exterior, and set on the western front is what appears to be a chapel. I was scarcely aware of having entered the park, and it strikes me that we must have crossed into it a while ago; that the land we’ve been driving on all this time belongs to Winterbourne.

      Gnarled trees creep out of the drowning afternoon. To our left, away from the sea, spreads a wild, dark wood, dense with firs and the soft black mystery of how it feels to be lost, away from home, when you are a child and the night draws close. On the other, the sea is a wide-eyed stare, lighter and smoother now we are near, like pearls held in a cold hand. I see what Tom meant about the drop from the cliffs: the land sweeps up and away from the hall, a brief sharp lip like the crest of a wave, and then it is a four-hundred-foot plummet to the rocks. Further still into that unblinking spread I detect Polcreath Point, the tower light, a mile or so from the shore.

      ‘Here we are, miss.’ Tom turns the Rolls a final time and we embark up the final stretch towards the house, a narrow track between overgrown topiary. Leafy fingers drag against the windows, and the car rocks over a series of potholes that propels my vanity case into the foothold. At last we emerge into an oval of gravel, at the centre of which is an unkempt planter, tangled with weeds.

      ‘Winterbourne Hall.’

      I gaze up at my new lodgings, and imagine how my arrival must look. A throbbing engine, a lonely car – and a woman, peering skyward, her hand poised to open the door, and some slight switch of nameless apprehension that makes her pause.

       *

      The first thing I notice is the smell. It isn’t unpleasant, merely unusual, a liturgical smell like the inside of a church: wood, stone and burning candles.

      There are no candles burning. The entrance is gloomy, lit by a flickering candelabrum. ‘Ticky generator,’ explains Tom, taking off his cap. ‘We use fires, mostly.’ I look up at the chandelier, its bulbs bruised with dust and casting an uncertain glow that sends tapered shadows across the walls. The ceiling is ribbed and vaulted, like the roof of a basilica, but its decorations are bleached and crumbled. A staircase climbs ahead of me, a faded scarlet runner up its centre, bolted in place by gold pins. Some of the pins are missing and the carpet frays up against the wood like a rabbit’s tail. On the upper walls, a trio of hangings in red and bronze sits alongside twisting metal sconces, better suited to a Transylvanian castle than to a declining Cornish home. There is a large stone fireplace, coated in soot, and several items of heavy Elizabethan furniture positioned in alcoves: elaborate dark-wood chairs, an occasional table, and a hulking chest with edges wreathed in nail heads.

      On the landing above, I see closed doors, set with gothic forging. The windows are heavily draped in velvet, with tasselled tiebacks. Dozens of eyes watch me watching. Paintings of the captain’s ancestors bear down from every facet.

      For a moment I have the uncanny sense of having been here before – then I place the connection. The headmaster’s study at Burstead. How, when a girl was called in for a flogging, she would be surrounded by an army of onlookers – those men, tyrants past, with their shining eyes and satisfied smirks, their portraits as immovable as the headmaster’s intention, and she would stand in the red punitive glow of the stained-glass window and bite her lip while the first lash came…

      Afterwards, when they couldn’t decide how the tragedy had happened, they brought us all in for a whipping; perhaps they thought the belt would draw it out of us as cleanly as it drew blood to the skin. The difficulty was that nobody except me knew the truth. Nobody else had been there. They sensed a secret, dark and dreadful, rippling through the dormitories like an electrical charge, but I was the only girl who knew and I wasn’t about to share it. So I kept my lips shut and I let the lashes come for me and for the others, and time passed and term ended and school finished not long after that.

      I blink, and take my gloves off.

      ‘Where are the children?’ I ask. ‘I should like to introduce myself.’

      Tom gives me a strange look. ‘The captain asked us to settle you in first, miss. The twins can get overexcited. They like to play games.’

      ‘Well, they’re children, aren’t they?’

      He pauses, as if my query might have some other answer.

      ‘What happened to their previous governess? The woman before me?’

      ‘She left,’ Tom replies, too quickly and smoothly for it to be the truth. ‘One morning, suddenly. We had no warning, miss, honestly. She sent word days later – a family emergency. She was mighty sad about it, hated letting the captain down. We all of us hate to let the captain down. It’d be horrible if he was let down again, wouldn’t it, miss? After the effort he’s gone to, to bring you down here. There’s only so much a man can take. The captain said there was no way round it, and the world exists outside Winterbourne whether we like it or not. Because you do feel that way, miss, here, after a while. Like Winterbourne is all there is, just the house and sea. You find you don’t need anything else.’ His expression is unfathomable, doggedly loyal.

      ‘Do СКАЧАТЬ