The Whispering House Page 15

  “I forgot to tell you. Rainwater’s getting in upstairs. I put a bowl on the landing to catch the drips, but you might want to check your bedroom.”

  She nodded, but without enthusiasm.

  “And while you’re doing that, I’ll switch on the heater in the other room, and we can sit in there and talk. It’ll be more cheerful.”

  “Okay.” She made no move, however, but continued to sit there, her head in her hands.

  Sam got up, crossed the hall into the living room, and switched on the electric heater. There was a smell of scorched dust as it warmed up, but the glow was comforting, even if it didn’t do much to dispel the damp atmosphere. He was about to leave the room when he noticed Hannah’s schoolbag lying on the floor, its contents still scattered where he’d left it after searching for paper and a pencil to play Scrabble. Just in case it caused any awkward questions, he knelt down and began to gather up the books and pens, stuffing them hastily inside the bag. It wasn’t until he had finished and stood up that he spied one last item—a piece of paper, much folded and crushed—lying underneath a chair. Bending down to retrieve it, he grinned wryly, recognizing one of his own airplanes. It certainly wasn’t going to be doing much flying now! He was about to chuck it in the wastepaper basket when something stopped him. He stared at the crumpled paper. Then, gradually, his heart started to beat a little faster.

  Because, of course, to a Victorian child, what he held in his hand wasn’t an airplane at all. It was a flying bird.

  Hannah hadn’t moved from the kitchen table. She sat there, still with her head in her hands. She knew she should go and check on her bedroom but couldn’t summon the energy just then. The cold and damp seemed to have seeped into her bones. And she noticed for the first time how quiet the house was. The rain had stopped now, and the only sound in the kitchen was the faint whir coming from the refrigerator.

  She had been sitting there, quite still, for about ten minutes, when she heard the noise. An odd, splitting sound was followed a few seconds later by a dull, muffled thump. Frowning, she stood up. The noise had come from directly above her head, which was where her bedroom was. Sam must have gone up there to check on the damage.

  “Are you okay?” she called. “Sam?”

  When he didn’t answer, she went out into the hall, in time to see him coming out of the living room.

  “What happened? That sounded like it came from your room. Did you move something in there?” he demanded.

  “I haven’t been up there! I thought you—” She stopped. They stared at one another, each trying not to see the alarm in the other’s eyes.

  Sam ran lightly halfway up the staircase. “Who’s there?” His voice echoed slightly around the stairwell, then faded into silence. Complete silence.

  “The front door was locked when we got back from the fair. Could anyone have gotten in through a window?”

  “I don’t know. Should we call the police?” she whispered.

  He shook his head and walked slowly and quietly up the remaining stairs. When he reached the landing, he put out his hand to the light switch and pressed it. Nothing happened. “Fetch a flashlight,” he muttered.

  She ran across the hallway, picked up the heavy flashlight that was kept by the front door, and with legs now feeling like jelly, mounted the stairs.

  Sam was kneeling in front of the closed door of her bedroom, trying to look through the keyhole. “It’s too dark in there. Can’t see a thing.” He stood up, took the flashlight from her, and switched it on. Then, drawing a deep breath, he flung open the door.

  There was no one there. But a sour, acrid smell hit them at the same moment as the beam of light showed a scene of utter devastation. Above the fireplace, a large section of the ceiling had come down, bringing with it a great swath of waterlogged paper from the chimneypiece. It hung in folds over the mantelpiece, like a huge, sodden curtain.

  But that wasn’t what made Hannah stare, transfixed in terrified disbelief. It was what lay beneath.

  It was a repeated pattern of ash leaves. The long, pointed spears had faded slightly over the years, but only slightly, and in the clear beam of the flashlight it was possible to see that once they had been a bright, vivid green.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Veil between the Worlds

  HANNAH HAD NO CLEAR memory of stumbling downstairs—all she wanted to do was to get out of that horrible room as fast as possible. Back in the living room, she crouched, shivering, in front of the electric heater, her body and brain numb with shock.

  Sam knelt beside her, his arm around her shoulders, waiting for the shaking to stop.

  After a few minutes she managed to stand up and walk groggily to the sofa, sinking down on the cushions, her head thrown back, eyes closed. Sam joined her but said nothing for now, giving her time to recover.

  At last Hannah opened her eyes and looked at him. “Maisie wasn’t dreaming at all, was she? She saw those leaves. They were all around her on the wallpaper!”

  “Didn’t I say at the beginning that they could have been your dreams, but not necessarily hers? Remember what Millie Murdoch told us, that the first symptoms of arsenic poisoning are drowsiness—confusion. If she’d been reading those stories about kids getting lost in a forest, it’s easy to see how she could have jumbled everything up so it seemed to her like she was in a forest too. Waiting for the wicked witch to appear. And the witch did appear, didn’t she? Only it was really her aunt, bringing medicine in a cup. Isn’t that what you saw in your dream?”

  “I suppose it could have been.” With an effort, Hannah sat up, trying to make herself think clearly, logically. “When Maisie was ill, she would have been lying in bed a lot of the time. The sun might have been shining outside. If it shone on the wallpaper, it would have made the leaves sparkle, just like in my dream, but the sky between them wouldn’t have been blue, of course, because the wallpaper’s background is white. That’s why I thought it looked overcast.”

  “And she could have heard the birds singing outside, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What about the fire? The one you could hear crackling.”

  Hannah frowned and bit her lip. “Not sure. I suppose there could have been a bonfire in the garden or something, but it seemed too close for that.”

  “Just a minute . . . isn’t there a fireplace in that room? It’s boarded over now, but it could have been lit then, couldn’t it? Especially as Maisie was sick.”

  “Then why couldn’t I see it?”

  “Her bed was in a different place?”

  “But I don’t think it was,” said Hannah slowly. “There was that little polished table, you see. The one with the cloth and the water pitcher. It was right there—beside me. I’m pretty sure Maisie’s bed was exactly where mine is now, only . . . wait! Victorian beds were much higher than ours. My grandmother’s got one, and when I was little I always hade to be lifted into it whenever I went to stay. If Maisie had been a couple of feet higher, and lying down, she could have heard the fire but not seen it. And it explains why the doll’s face was so close—she must have had it lying in the bed right next to her!”

  “Exactly. You were seeing that room just like it looked to Maisie, a hundred and forty years ago.”

  Suddenly Hannah collapsed back against the sofa cushions. She had begun to shiver again. “How can we be talking about all this so calmly? It’s creepy! And . . . and it still doesn’t tell us who murdered Maisie!”

  “No? I think it does,” he replied quietly. “You’d better read this.” And he handed her a sheet of crumpled paper.

  She stared blankly, first at the sheet, then at him. “What is this?”

  “Emily’s notes on the death of Napoleon. Remember she couldn’t find them that day in the library? It’s because I’d picked the page up by accident and made an airplane out of it.”

  At any other time she would have laughed. But not now. “I don’t want to read it. Just tell me what you’ve found out, Sam. Please tell
me what Napoleon has to do with all this!”

  He sat still for a moment, looking away from her, as if trying to decide how to tackle it, where to begin. Then he turned back.

  “Okay. The part about the lock of hair and the analysis you already know. Obviously. But for some reason Emily didn’t tell you what happened afterward?”

  “No. She didn’t.”

  “Well, it turns out that quite a long time later, a scientist asked a weird question. The question was, what color was Napoleon’s wallpaper?”

  Hannah’s eyes widened, but she said nothing.

  “He wanted to know if it had been green.”

  She swallowed. “Go on.”

  “I’ll read the next bit. It’ll be simpler.” He looked down at the notes, flattening out the creases with the palm of his hand.

  “‘The answer he received was that the wallpaper in the main room at Longwood on the island of Saint Helena was mostly red but contained elements of green, which he held to be significant on the basis of the following data.’”

  Sam glanced up. Hannah was sitting rigidly, her face pale.

  “Are you ready for this?”

  She nodded.

  “Right. Here goes.” He took a deep breath and started to read again.

  “‘Sometime in the late 1700s, a bright-green wallpaper dye had been developed. The color was attractive, it was easy to make, and it soon became very popular. It was called Scheele’s Green after the man who invented it. What wasn’t generally known was that something called copper arsenite was used in the manufacturing, and it was only when this paper had been in common use for about seventy years that somebody noticed that when it hung in a damp room, it gave off an odd smell. Green was a particularly popular color for bedrooms, and at around this time, it must have occurred to people as odd that so many of these green-papered bedrooms turned into sickrooms and, often, worse. At first, deaths and illnesses attributed to green-papered rooms were thought to be caused by flecks of green dust that detached themselves from the paper and were then breathed in. It wasn’t until years later that an Italian chemist worked out that fungi living on wallpaper paste converted inorganic arsenic into a gas, which, in the right conditions, could become lethal.’”

  He paused for a few seconds before quietly reading the final sentence.

  “‘It is now accepted that arsenic gas from wallpaper was responsible for thousands of previously unexplained nineteenth-century deaths, many of them young children, dying in their own green-decorated bedrooms.’”

  After he’d finished, they were both silent for some time. Hannah realized that all the time he’d been reading, her muscles had been locked in tension. Now she released them and found she was shaking again.

  “Hey! You okay?” He looked at her in concern. “Why don’t you move closer to the fire? I’ll get something to put over you.”

  She submitted to being moved into a chair nearer the fire while he fetched his jacket from the hall and tucked it in around her. It smelled comfortingly of him, but she still felt weak from this new shock. “It was the wallpaper that killed her!” she said huskily.

  He nodded. “No wonder those green leaves gave you nightmares. They were deadly!”

  Again they said nothing for a little while, each considering the implications of what they’d just learned, in a silence broken only by the soft ticking of the grandfather clock.

  At last, warmed by the fire, Hannah stopped shaking. Gradually her color began to return.

  “You know, I think I’ve figured out what might have caused the dreams. I never made the connection before, but now, looking back, I never had them when the weather was dry. Only when it was very damp. And those are exactly the conditions that would have made the paper lethal! Remember that weird smell in the room? I’ve noticed it before, just after waking from a nightmare.”

  “You think the poison is still active?” He looked at her in alarm.

  She shook her head. “After all this time? But what if something in the atmosphere triggered a kind of memory in the room?”

  “And your brain connected with that memory while you were asleep?”

  Hannah didn’t reply straightaway. She was recalling the words of the woman in the shop.

  “People always seem to move out after a spell of wet weather.”

  Then something else came back to her. Something Miss Murdoch had said once, at Halloween.

  “Remember, on this night the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest!”

  The past was like this house—concealed by layer upon layer of more recent history, but never entirely eradicated. Could it be that at certain times of year, given the right conditions, it might be possible to glimpse beyond those layers to the things that lurked beneath? Had other people seen strange things at this time of year? Things they couldn’t handle?

  She sighed. “I don’t know what was happening in my brain, but I wonder what was going on in Laetitia’s. Mrs. Grocott said she was a clever woman. D’you think she had an idea Maisie was being poisoned? Was that why she insisted on taking over all the nursing—trying to get Maisie moved to her own room? We were so busy suspecting her that we never thought about it the other way around. What if she suspected the servants? No wonder they didn’t like her. She probably acted like she didn’t trust them, and showed it!”

  “And then when Maisie got worse, which she was bound to do—being in that room—it would have given them even more reason to suspect her. Add to that the bruises and the state of the doll, and . . .”

  Sam stopped. They stared at each other in horror as the significance of what he’d just said dawned on them both at the same time.

  “If Maisie wasn’t murdered by anyone in this house,” Hannah whispered, “then who stuck the pins into that doll?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Maisie’s Secret

  THE QUESTION CAME LIKE a dousing of cold water, for a moment threatening to wash away their carefully constructed theory as if it were a sand castle about to be toppled by the advancing tide.

  Hannah forced herself to think of that monstrous creature, which, even after more than a hundred years, still had had the stench of evil clinging to it. She saw again those wild, staring eyes, the disfiguring brown stains on the body, the white dress that had been a copy of Maisie’s own. And then she remembered something her mother had said on first seeing that dress. Something that had seemed trivial at the time.

  “These holes are way too big for the buttons. That’s unusual. Victorian sewing is usually so neat.”

  What did that mean? That the doll’s dress had been changed by somebody who wasn’t very good at sewing? Or by someone who was just learning how to sew? Like a child, for example. A child who had carefully embroidered a handkerchief for her mother.

  Again she heard her own mother’s words.

  “I suspect she had a certain amount of help with this. It’s pretty impressive for a nine-year-old!”

  Of course. Her aunt would have helped her to sew the handkerchief, patiently showing her the stitches, correcting her when she went wrong. But the doll had been different. That had been altered in secret. She had had no help there.

  And finally Hannah thought of Laetitia, who, with selfless devotion, had carefully concealed those little treasures so that Maisie would never find them and know that her mother hadn’t wanted them. But it wasn’t Laetitia’s love that Maisie had needed. So she had rejected it, thrown it back, like the cup in her dream, with all the careless cruelty of childhood suffering, and set about her diabolical little scheme.

  Now that they knew all the rest, it was so obvious.

  “It was Maisie,” she said, shivering. “Maisie did it!”

  Sam said nothing, but she could see from his face that he knew she was right.

  One by one, all the layers of deception and misconstruction were being stripped away, leaving only the stark, dismal truth. The story might be old and forgotten, but like the hidden paper, it had always been there.


  “There’s just one thing,” he said wearily. “It’s not important, and I don’t suppose we’re ever going to find out now, but . . . those bruises on the doll. If Maisie wanted to make them look like her own bruises, why didn’t she try to make them more realistic—more random?”

  And now at last, ridiculously, Hannah found herself close to tears. “I forgot! Inspector Bean told me what they were, but I didn’t bother about it at the time because I was only thinking about the hair. Those brown marks on the body weren’t ever supposed to be bruises. They’re iodine. Maisie must have taken the pins out when she realized her mother wasn’t taking any notice of them, but the holes they left showed her that she’d been unkind to her doll, and she wanted to make it better. Iodine’s an antiseptic. You see,” she whispered, trying to control her trembling voice, “she was only a little girl.”

  Sam looked at her somberly for a few moments, then got up and left the room. He returned a few seconds later with a paper towel. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” She took it and blew her nose.

  “You know,” he said, sitting down next to her on the sofa, “I have a feeling that you were meant to find those things—the doll, the box, the paints, the book of fairy tales. Without them, you couldn’t make sense of what the house was trying to tell you.”

  “You think it was this house that was trying to tell me? Why not Maisie? And come to that, why not us? We’ve solved this together, haven’t we?”

  “The house helped us uncover the story,” he said slowly. “That’s always been there, waiting for someone who’d take enough trouble to find out the truth. But . . .” He hesitated, not wanting to burden her with more than she could take just then. “I think that the messages were from Maisie herself, and they were meant for you.”

  Hannah looked bleakly at him. Then she rubbed her eyes. “You may be right, but . . . I’m sorry, I can’t think about it anymore tonight.”

  Sam got up and walked to the window, drawing the curtain aside a little. “The sky’s cleared. It’s a fine night.” He looked at his watch. “And it’s almost one a.m. We may as well try and get some sleep.”