2: Chocolate Box Girls: Marshmallow Skye (4 page)

4

The next day, Summer has a ballet class after school and Coco, Cherry and I are in the kitchen, ploughing through homework while Mum makes marshmallow cupcakes. Marshmallow has always been my favourite taste in the world, although Summer has never been keen.

‘It’s so boring,’ she used to say, wrinkling up her nose. ‘So plain. Sweet but nothingy.’

I’ve always had this horrible feeling that she thinks I’m boring and plain and nothingy too, for liking it.

But to me marshmallow isn’t boring at all. It is soft and sweet and fluffy, a little piece of heaven.

I spot the old pine trunk, still sitting in a corner, and like last night, the tiniest shiver runs down my spine. I’m not sure whether it comes from fear or excitement.

‘Mum?’ I ask, as she sets the cupcakes on a rack to cool, ‘I was wondering … what are you actually going to do with the trunk from the attic?’

Mum frowns. ‘Well, I don’t know … all that stuff is probably worth quite a bit to an antiques dealer. And we could really use the money right now. It’ll be Christmas in a couple of months.’

‘No!’ I protest. ‘Don’t sell them!’

I don’t know why, but the thought of Clara’s things being sold feels wrong.

Mum frowns. ‘But we haven’t got anywhere to put them – Paddy’s about to clear out the attic, so we’d just end up having to store them in the workshop … Although Summer did take the blue birdcage at breakfast time – said she was going to put a plant in it. Would any of the rest of you like something from the trunk?’

‘Me!’ Coco pipes up. ‘The violin! I have always wanted one, and Paddy said he’d teach me if I had something to practise on.’

‘Is that a good idea?’ Mum asks. ‘Coco, you are totally gorgeous and wonderful and talented, but I am not certain that music is your strong point! Remember the time you
tried to learn the recorder for that Christmas carol concert back in Year Three?’

Coco may not, but I do. She drove us all crazy, until one day the recorder went mysteriously missing and was never seen again.

‘Shame,’ Honey had said at the time, ruffling Coco’s hair. ‘It seems to have vanished into thin air!’

I think it may actually have vanished into the dustbin, with a little help from Honey, but all of us breathed a huge sigh of relief. Coco had to play the cowbells instead, and even then she couldn’t keep to the beat.

‘This will be different,’ Coco insists now. ‘Paddy will teach me. Properly. Please?’

‘I suppose,’ Mum says doubtfully, licking a curl of vanilla frosting from her fingertip and dotting golden-brown toasted mini marshmallows across the freshly iced cakes. Coco dives into the trunk and rescues the battered leather case, opening it up to reveal a glossy golden violin. She lifts it to her shoulder and saws the bow across it, and a sound like several cats being strangled fills the kitchen.

‘Ouch,’ Coco says. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks …’

Mum offers the plate of still-warm cupcakes around,
and I take one eagerly, biting into melting marshmallow sprinkles.

‘What about you, Cherry? Is there anything you’d like from the trunk?’

‘Not really,’ Cherry says. ‘It’s awesome, but … well, it’s just a bit too spooky for me.’

‘OK, Skye, so if you don’t want me to sell it, do you want anything from the trunk? The dresses, maybe?’

I blink. ‘No way … those dresses … could I really have them?’

‘Why not?’ Mum says. ‘You love vintage clothes, don’t you? I think Clara would have wanted you to have them.’

Half an hour later, the pine trunk is sitting next to my bed in the room Summer and I share. I lift the lid and push aside the crumpled tissue paper. For a moment I breathe in the faintest scent of marshmallow, a heady mixture of warm vanilla and sugar. Then it’s gone, replaced by the whiff of dust and age and sadness. Was it the aroma of Mum’s cupcakes, drifting up from the kitchen, or the remnants of some long-ago perfume? Although I’m not sure the scent would last all that time. It’s probably just my imagination.

Last night, the whole idea of Clara’s trunk was so spooky
I didn’t look too carefully at what was inside … but it’s like treasure.

The trunk is filled with jewel-bright velvet shift dresses and petticoats made of white cotton lace. There are crinkled leather shoes with little heels, straw hats and cloche hats, and white gloves of soft suede. There is a feathered headband and silver bracelets tarnished dark with age, a beaded clutch bag, and folded carefully, right at the bottom, a soft woollen coat the colour of emeralds, lined with green satin.

I slip the coat on, button it up, let the skirt spin out around me. This coat is soft and warm and barely worn at all, a million times better than my usual jumble-sale finds. Everything in the trunk is perfect, as though it were put away just yesterday and not ninety years ago.

I try on the white cotton petticoats, the velvet shift dresses, one at a time … midnight blue, moss green, crimson. Clara Travers must have been small and slender because the clothes seem to fit. I don’t look like a child wearing adult clothes, not at all. A while ago I read a book about the 1920s, all jazz records and flapper girls. I pull on a cloche hat, peer out from under the rim, grinning, looking in the mirror for traces of a flapper girl from long ago.

Judging by the cool clothes, I am pretty certain that Clara Travers liked to dance, that she listened to jazz music and learned the Charleston and had a dozen young men queuing up to dance with her in her bright flapper dresses and feathered headband. She was a cool girl, a party girl, I know it. Wearing these clothes, I suddenly feel a bit that way too … brave, beautiful, grown-up.

Then I remember Grandma Kate’s story – that Clara was engaged to be married to a man much older than herself, and my smile fades.

Who was Clara Travers?
I wonder to myself.
A rich girl with a trunkful of velvet dresses, an armful of bangles, a head filled with dreams?
She was seventeen, just three years older than Honey is now. That seems way too young to be tied down to a man she didn’t love. I try to imagine Honey being paired off with some old bloke of thirty or forty, and shudder. It must have felt like the end of everything.

Was there ever a romance, or was it just an alliance made for money, security, status? Did Clara’s parents arrange it all? And how did a girl like Clara fall in love with a gypsy, so much in love she couldn’t see a future without him?

The bedroom door swings open and Summer comes in, her hair still pinned up from dance class, her ballet bag swinging.

‘Mum says tea’s ready in ten minutes,’ she says, then stops short as she sees me properly.

Suddenly, I don’t feel like a beautiful 1920s girl any more, just a little kid caught doing something she shouldn’t.

‘What is all that, Skye?’ she asks. ‘Why are you wearing those creepy old clothes?’

Just as it did earlier when Mum mentioned the possibility of selling Clara’s things, a strong feeling surfaces inside me.

‘They’re not creepy, just old,’ I say, and my eyes light on the old powder-blue birdcage with the twisty wire bars that now sits in the corner behind Summer’s bed. ‘Like your birdcage. Vintage chic, right?’

‘It’s different,’ Summer insists. ‘The birdcage is one thing, but don’t you think it’s a bit weird, actually wearing Clara’s things? I mean … she’s dead. It’s just too spooky.’

I laugh. ‘I love vintage clothes. I wear old stuff all the time …’

Summer raises an eyebrow. ‘That’s different. Clara
Travers killed herself,’ she huffs. ‘Please, Skye, take her things off. I don’t like it.’

I pull off the cloche hat, and as I do I catch a glimpse of my reflection. For a moment I look defiant, determined – not like me at all. I blink, and the illusion is gone. The mirror just shows a smiley girl with wavy blonde hair, wearing a dress from long ago.

I pull the crimson flapper dress over my head and fold it carefully back into the trunk, but I leave the white cotton petticoat, the bracelets. I pull on a jumper, twirl round in front of the mirror.

It looks good, but Summer still seems troubled.

‘What?’ I say to her, trying to laugh it off. ‘You think Clara’s going to haunt me? Come on! I mean … seriously?’

‘No, of course not,’ Summer says. ‘But … well, maybe the stories are right, and her spirit does roam around Tanglewood? Looking for her lost love?’ I mean, don’t you think it was strange that last night we’d just been talking about Clara Travers, and then a few minutes later we went inside and all her things had turned up after almost a hundred years of being lost? On Halloween, as well!’

‘Hey, hey,’ I whisper. ‘That stuff was never lost, it was in
the attic the whole time. It’s just coincidence that Paddy started to clear the attic on Halloween. It doesn’t
mean
anything, Summer!’

Summer sighs. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like it …’

I try to shrug away her concern. There’s no way that anything genuinely spooky is going on.

Like I said, I don’t believe in ghosts …

5

I step outside, closing the door behind me softly, and the grass beneath my feet is studded with daisies and the air smells marshmallow sweet. I am wearing a blue velvet dress and little shoes with a button strap, and my wrists jangle with silver bracelets – shiny bright, like new.

I slip out through the little picket gate with the mallow flowers arched on either side, and run into the woods, with the sun shining down through a canopy of green.

I walk down through the trees, my heart beating fast, a soft flutter of excitement bubbling up inside. And then I smell woodsmoke, and looking down through the branches of the twisty hazel trees I can see four bow-top gypsy wagons in the clearing below.

A woodfire smoulders nearby, a blackened kettle hanging above it, and half a dozen horses, big and patterned with variations of black and white, are grazing nearby. Two small girls in raggedy dresses play a hiding game among the trees, and a couple of dark-haired men are mending pots and pans beside the fire.

There’s the sound of twigs breaking softly behind me, and a skinny, dishevelled dog that looks like a tawny-coloured toilet brush rushes up and nudges my hand. I stroke the dog and scratch its ears, and turn round slowly. Suddenly, my heart does a backflip inside my chest and my cheeks flush.

The boy walking towards me through the trees is a stranger, but it feels like I have known him forever. He is tall and tanned, with dark hair that flops down across his face and eyes so blue they take my breath away. His clothes are strange, old-fashioned, a white shirt with no collar and the sleeves rolled up, a threadbare waistcoat and cord trousers the colour of bracken. At his neck is a red scarf, knotted carelessly.

Just then, a bird flies up from a nearby branch, a flash of red and brown, a flurry of wings.

Finch,
I think
. The boy’s name is Finch.

‘Hey,’ he says, and his face breaks into a grin. His hand reaches out to catch mine, holding tight.

I sit up, pushing the hair back from my face, my heart racing. I wonder where I am for a moment, but in the half-light of dawn I can see I’m in the room I share with my twin. I
remember trying on Clara’s clothes last night, before supper, then squabbling with Summer about it. I remember Summer, Cherry and Coco choosing a DVD and curling up on the sofas to watch, but I was tired and sloped off to my room, flaking out early.

‘That,’ I say out loud, ‘was the weirdest dream ever.’

‘Huh?’ Summer murmurs from under her duvet. ‘What dream?’

‘It seemed so real,’ I frown. ‘Like it was actually happening. But I wasn’t really me. Or if I was, then everything else was just kind of muddled and wrong … I don’t know. Weird.’

Summer doesn’t reply, but she blinks at me with sleepy, troubled eyes, her brows slanting into a frown.

That’s when I realize I am still wearing the white cotton petticoat that once belonged to Clara Travers …