hesitated. It was a long time since she had been able to command the reverie. Long ago, by emptying her mind on an exhaled breath, she had been able to slip into a peaceful dimension of intense colours. She had been a rebellious child, and she had used the ability as a shield against adult wrath and a refuge from tedium. Later when she had taken employment as an artists’ model, she had made professional use of the reverie to hold her pose in the life-drawing class.
The power had gradually deserted her at about the time she fell in love with Devil, and she supposed now that the condition had been connected with the physical and emotional changes of young womanhood. She had never heard voices from the other side, and she was sure that her innocent reverie was no channel to the supernatural.
Devil had been the one who claimed that he saw ghosts. But then Devil had suffered such hardships and horrors during his childhood it was hardly surprising his imagination had turned macabre. Yet he too had grown out of his susceptibility. He had not spoken of his ghosts for many years now.
Eliza considered herself to be a rational woman with modern ideas. Her scepticism was founded in years of exposure to the tricks and devices of stage illusionists.
‘No, the dead do not speak to us,’ she answered at length. ‘But as you already know there are some people who claim they do.’
‘Why do they do that?’
She patted Nancy’s hand. The naivety of the question reassured her. It was time to finish this conversation and move on to healthier topics.
‘For money, or perhaps for public attention,’ she smiled. ‘Now, look at the time. You should go and dress, or we will be late at Aunt Faith’s.’
Nancy went upstairs. Across the landing, in the larger front bedroom shared by Cornelius and Arthur, Arthur’s school trunk and boxes were packed and corded ready for the carrier. Tomorrow, Devil and Eliza would drive their son to Harrow School in the De Dion-Bouton. The motor car had been polished to a state of glittering perfection by old Gibb, the chauffeur-mechanic Devil had employed to look after it.
In contrast to his brother’s success, Cornelius had recently become a clerk in a shipping office. Every day he carried sandwiches packed in a tin box to his place of work and he had described to Nancy how he sat on a bench in a nearby graveyard to eat them.
‘I like it. It’s peaceful.’
He dismissed all questions about his colleagues or the actual work he performed, but this surprised no one. Cornelius was never communicative.
Nancy leaned on the windowsill, as Lizzie had done when she smoked the startling cigarette. From here she could look straight down into the basement area where the mangle stood under its tin roof. A little iron bridge led from the dining room across to the garden where Eliza liked to grow flowers for their fragrance. The strong perfume of night-scented jasmine was already drifting upwards.
She hadn’t confided in her mother. She had the not altogether unpleasant sense of having cut her moorings.
She had said No to Mr Feather because it was true in the broad sense. She didn’t think she could speak to Mrs Clare.
Yet she did know that there had been an unnatural relationship between Mr Feather and his sister. Helena Clare had been afraid of him; Nancy had clearly seen it in her face. Instead of the garden lying below her she saw a boathouse and a moored boat with cushioned seats. Outside, shafts of greenish light struck across lake water and in the shadowy interior two bodies grappled and then locked together. The rowing boat violently rocked. She was witnessing something horrible and wrong, and she was disgusted as well as afraid.
It was a mild evening, still early, but the hairs on Nancy’s forearms rose.
She drew her head inside and slammed the window on the Uncanny. An unexpected glint of light on metal caught her eye and she crossed to her dressing table to see what it was. Lying next to her hairbrush was a silver locket she had never seen before. The chain was neatly folded but it was tarnished, as was the locket itself. She picked it up and cupped it in the hollow of her hand. There was a faint design of engraved leaves on the front and traces of dirt caught in the filigree. Unwillingly, she turned the piece over.
The initials engraved on the reverse were HMF.
Her hand shook but she slipped her thumbnail into the crease between the halves of the locket and prised it open. Within lay two locks of hair, twisted to form a ring and bound with scarlet thread. The tiny circlet was damp and earth was matted in it.
She closed the locket and dropped it on the dressing table. She knew whose initials these must be, and whose heads the two locks of hair had come from.
Arthur raced up the stairs, his boots skidding on the linoleum. He drummed on Nancy’s door.
‘Wait,’ she told him.
When she glanced down again the dressing table was bare except for her hairbrush and comb.
The Shaws lived in a suburban enclave of substantial new red-brick villas to the north of Maida Vale. It was a highly respectable area marked out by pleached limes and encaustic tiles, leafy in summer and scented in winter with coal smoke and damp earth. The Shaws’ house had a projecting double-height bay topped off with a conical turret roofed in slate, for which Devil had mockingly nicknamed it Bavaria after one of Ludwig’s fantasy castles. Their own smaller, more gracefully proportioned house was a hundred years older but the stink of the tanneries to the east often crept around it, and decaying hovels and factories crowded at the margins of the canal basin only yards from their door. Yet Devil would not hear of a move to anywhere more rural. He loathed suburbia and claimed to have a physical aversion to open countryside.
Matthew came to the door dressed in shirtsleeves and a woollen waistcoat. He loved his home and presiding over his table, and was always a happier man on his own territory. Devil was formal in a starched collar and a fitted coat. He raised an eyebrow as the men shook hands.
‘On your way up to bed, Matty?’
Laughing, Matthew ruffled Arthur’s hair. Arthur bore this with good humour, even though in a year or so he would easily top his uncle in height.
‘Here he is, the scholar. You’ll be talking to us in Latin or Greek by Christmas, Arthur, eh?’
‘I already know Latin and Greek, Uncle Matthew.’
Faith came forward, rosy-cheeked and handsome in a new blue dress.
‘So we are all together again. Rowland and Edwin have come from Town specially to give you a send-off, Arthur.’
Rowland stuck out a hand. ‘Arthur, my boy. We’ve been waiting for you. Come out for a smoke with us?’
‘Rowland, please,’ Faith remonstrated.
Arthur glowed. He admired his adult cousins and he liked nothing better than listening to their knowing talk about girls and business. The three of them went outside to a little stone-paved terrace bordered with azalea bushes and Japanese maples. Lizzie made a point of taking Nancy by the arm and leading her to the window seat at the other end of the room for a cosy talk. Cornelius sat calmly. As always he gave the impression of being busy with his own thoughts.
The first breath of autumn in the air gave Matthew the excuse to light a fire, and as the day faded Faith turned on the lamps under their
