‘How did you know I’d be here?’ I ask.
‘Brian called me – said you’d gone wandering in the walls. There’s only a few places that you’d come out in one piece.’
‘Wait – what?’ It’s hard to tell if she’s joking or not and then I remember she is Mamó.
‘Did you break the padlock?’
I nod. She says, ‘You’ll be replacing that for me.’
‘For you?’ I ask. ‘Is it your secret passage to Brian’s office then?’
‘It was in his father’s time. I mainly use it for storage now.’
‘What was it for before?’
She grunts at me. That’s all I’m going to get. I nod at her. It’s easier than speaking. My throat is dry. She hands me a little bottle of clear liquid. I drink from it. It burns my well-worn throat.
‘What is it?’
‘Something small to help you,’ she tells me. ‘We used to use it for babies when they were teething back in the day. To shut them up. We called it Mother’s Lull.’
It tastes and smells like nail-polish remover. ‘Thank you?’
‘You are welcome,’ she says, and replaces the bottle in the glove compartment. ‘Father Byrne makes his own brand too. But mine is better.’
‘Who’s Father Byrne?’ I ask.
She snaps, ‘A priest. A man of God. One of them, at any rate.’
‘Everyone has secrets here. Even Brian. I wonder –’
‘Madeline,’ she says, ‘haven’t you enough to worry about, without putting names on everyone around you? And you can’t just dip your toe in and out again with this sort of thing. Either I’m training you or I am not. And currently I’m not. So save your questions.’ Her face is impassive, but not unkind.
‘Whatever happens though, we live here now. And surely I’m entitled to some sort of explanation of what is going on around us, in the place.’
‘Entitled. That’s you, right enough.’ Her tone is contemptuous. ‘You can’t refuse to turn around and ask someone to draw you a picture of what’s behind you instead of facing it. There are things you don’t know because you don’t have to know them yet. Accept it. Or turn around and LOOK.’
‘But Catlin –’ My voice slices through the air, more whiney than I had intended.
‘Look, Madeline. Your stepfather is trying,’ Mamó tells me. ‘And Lon won’t get very far with everyone watching your sister. Reporting back. And believe me, they will be.’
‘What happened with Helen Groarke? And Lon, before?’
‘No one’s sure of anything in this life. But if I had a daughter. Or a sister. Or a stranger. I wouldn’t want them spending time with that.’ She spits on to the dashboard. It leaves a white slick mark. An eye inside a face.
I look down at my shoes. They’re wet and filthy.
‘Sorry about the floor,’ I say, ‘and the lock.’
‘Sure they’re just little things,’ she says. ‘You’ll make amends for them. It isn’t complicated.’
I look down at my feet. I rub my boots, and smell my fingertips and rub again.
‘Mamó?’ I say.
‘What?’ she asks, and I shrink a little, but keep on going. ‘There’s blood on my boots, and it isn’t mine. Look.’ I thrust a grubby hand at her. ‘It’s old, I think. But it smells like …’
She pulls my hand to her nostrils, takes a sniff.
Our eyes meet.
She turns her face back towards the windscreen, grunts again. A different kind of grunt. Surprise, I think.
We reach the driveway. ‘I’m in a hurry, so I’ll leave you here,’ she tells me. ‘Also, I have to give you this. It was made with yourself in mind, so it’s no use to me. I know enough.’
I take it. It’s the small round sphere from in Bob’s beak. So black it’s blue and somehow also milky. I stare at it. It isn’t smooth. It’s pitted like a peach pit. On the surface, tufts of something cling.
‘What is it for?’
‘Just keep it in your pocket,’ Mamó tells me. ‘It’s not a charm, but it is good to have.’
I step out of the car, still none the wiser, and she speeds away. I stumble down the path towards my home that doesn’t feel like home. The sun is pale in the sky. The air is freezing. I feel the shadow of the yew trees on my face, and carry on going, shivering and limping. Cobwebs in my hair and dirty fingers. I need to shower and I want to sleep.
I lift my hands to my nose and take a breath.
She took her eyes off the road.
This blood surprised her.
And you can’t tell, from blood, where it came from. But when I smelled it, flash of recognition. Fear and fur, the forest.
And a blade.
31
Hazel
I smush my face into the soft, soft pillow and ignore the beeping of my phone. They will be fine without me, I think. Yesterday, no one had even noticed I was missing, except Brian. He said he didn’t want to worry Mam, that he felt really guilty that I’d gotten lost. He’d known about the door, but it hadn’t been in use since his father’s time.
He caught me in the hallway of the castle, pulled me into a very gangly hug.
‘I told her you’d gone for a walk,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. I panicked, and all of a sudden, there I was, lying to my wife about her child.’ Guilt doesn’t suit Brian. His face looked gaunt. Shadows underneath his eyes, and what else is he hiding?
Doors inside the walls and blood on stone.
Mam swoops into the room like a raven and grips me by the shoulders. I try to burrow away, like a mole, but a girl can only be a mole for so long when her mother is removing blankets and making statements like, ‘We need to talk.’
Of course she wants to know about the Catlin thing. Brian told her all about it. Mam can’t bring herself to say the name Helen Groarke – she calls her ‘that girl’ or ‘that poor girl’. The horror on her face. The weight of that. I should have told them sooner. Which is of course another thing she tells me. And I agree. Lon’s big white hands. The dark bruise on Catlin’s neck. Mam looks at me, her eyes reflecting my worry.
‘Why did you go to Brian and not to me?’ she asks, the furrows digging sideways in her brow. Two-thirds of a triangle. I don’t want to have hurt her feelings. I’m just so tired.
‘He’s family now, Mam. And he’s from here. I didn’t want to worry you with nothing.’ The heat is heavy, clinging to my skin. I poke a foot from under the duvet and flip my pillow. Cooler now, I shut my eyes, but only for a second.
‘This Lon,’ Mam asks, ‘how long have they been …?’
‘It happened really quickly after we moved here,’ I say. ‘She’s properly in love.’
Mam scoffs at this. ‘She’s sixteen years of age.’
‘So am I. That doesn’t mean our feelings aren’t real. Catlin thinks he’s her soulmate or something,’ I say. ‘I tried to tell her what I thought before. It didn’t help.’
‘She always was headstrong,’ Mam says, and not like it’s the good thing it once was.
She grips my hand. ‘The two of you are the most important things in my life,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to think that there’s this whole side to you I don’t know about. I mean, you lived in here.’ She cradles her abdomen beneath her dress.
‘Don’t make me go back there,’ I say, pretending to be frightened, and she laughs.
‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ she says. ‘And sometimes I think that’s almost a pity.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘So. What’s the fecker like?’ Her voice is heavy, trying to be light.
‘He’s got this stupid, handsome face.’