The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall (4 page)

Up next: eat the Tunnock's Teacake (I'm starving), and go see what Day Two in Wilderwood Hall has in store. Of course, the first thing to do is search out my mother. And to find her, all I have to do is follow the sound of singing.

Mum's voice is faint, but I easily recognize the tune: White Star Line's “Turn the Corner”
.
Even though he wrote it, RJ told Mum he thinks of it as “their” song. First, because the video shoot Mum and RJ met on was for that particular single. Second, 'cause RJ claims that the track was like some supernatural happening – he says it's as if he wrote the lyrics for Mum, before they'd ever set eyes on each other…

Pulling on a baggy old jumper I find on the floor, I peek out of the bedroom and find myself in a long corridor, peppered with doors. Looking left,
towards
one the end of the corridor, I can see a large doorway opening on to a set of plain stone stairs. That must lead down to the back door we came in through yesterday afternoon. The servants' entrance. And if I turn my head right – towards the other end of the corridor and the distant sound of singing – I can see a heavy, panelled door propped open with a cardboard packing box.

I walk towards it, knowing it must take me through into the main house. Downstairs, I remember from the floor plans, there's a passage that links the kitchens to the grand reception rooms, but
this
has to be the route the servants would have taken if they'd been needed by the master or mistress upstairs.

“…
And when your world isn't turning, and your path leads nowhere
…”

Following Mum's lilting, carefree voice, I step through the doorway, and find myself on the wide, sun-filled, first-floor landing of Wilderwood Hall proper. Flutters of curiosity fill my chest, even though this strange house feels so far from home. So little like
my
home.

“…
Don't be scared, keep on walking
…”

And I
am
walking, walking quickly past six
huge
empty bedrooms, plaster fallen from walls, patches of ceiling languishing on floors, all their vast windows gazing out on to the wild Wilderwood grounds. More doors, closed doors, are on the opposite side of the landing from them. Cupboards? Bathrooms? I'll investigate later; I'm at the top of the yawningly wide, sweeping set of stairs now and want to find Mum.

“…
Turn the corner, I'll be there
…”

Quickly, I trot down the steps towards an entrance hall – the “vestibule”, obviously – that's so vast our entire flat back in London could fit in it. And the double front door; it looks wide enough to drive our new
car
through, if it was open.

“…
Turn the corner
…”

I hurry across the echoing space, across the chipped cream-and-black tiles of the floor, singing the echoing part to the chorus, the part White Star Line's drummer usually takes.

“…
There I'll stand
…”

“Ha!” Mum laughs delightedly as I hurtle into an enormous room with equally spectacular amounts of ornate mouldings and
actual
mould on the walls.

She's wearing old boyfriend jeans and her favourite pink Arran knit jumper. Her blonde-white
hair
is piled up on top of her head with a pencil stuffed in it, holding it all in place. Against one wall is a bunch of big boards, filled with sketches and designs and swatches of paint and fabric. On the dusty but lavish mantelpiece sits Mum's iPod dock, and White Star Line's single – “Turn the Corner” – is blasting from the travel speaker.

“
Turn the corner
,” Mum carries on with the chorus, arms now outstretched, doing RJ's line.

“
Take my hand
,” I sing, jokily holding my hand out to Mum. She grabs it, even though it's a bit sticky with chocolate and marshmallow gloop.

“
Turn the corner
.” Mum pulls me to her.

“
Don't be scared
,” I sing, mock sincere
.

“
Turn the corner
.” Mum tilts her head, stares lovingly at me.

“
I'll be THERE!!
” I do that last bit in a dumb, over-the-top, operatic voice, and we both fall about laughing.

Then Mum lets go long enough to walk across to the fireplace and turn the volume down on the next track so we can hear each other talk.

In that tiny moment alone, I gaze around at the echoing, tatty room and my spirits sink again. What's Mum done taking us – dragging
me
– here?

“
What made you stick that song on?” I ask her. “Missing your husband, Mrs Johnstone?”

My words are jagged with a hint of sarcasm. I can't help it.

“‘Mrs Johnstone'… Ha! When will I get used to that?” Mum laughs, blissfully unaware of my barbed tone.

It's funny to think this is now Mum's third surname. She started out as Sadie Price, was very, very briefly Sadie Harper (when she married my dad), and now she's Sadie Johnstone. There are still plenty of Prices in our family – Granny and Uncle Ben and his family, who all emigrated to Australia – but now I'm the only one called Harper, since my dad doesn't count. That suddenly feels a lot like lonely…

“Anyway, yes, I'm missing RJ, but there's plenty to be getting busy with here!” Mum replies, spinning around in her white Converse trainers, as happy with the prospect of doing up this dump as a little kid being locked inside Legoland for the night.

I don't join in with the spinning; instead I stare some more at the state of the broken-down room, and think that it'll be a long, long time before Mum can get busy with details like paint and fabric. And
it's
just as well RJ is away working; camping out in the servants' quarters isn't exactly rock 'n' roll, is it? Plus I get Mum all to myself for just that little bit longer. We might be in the wrong place, but if I try really hard, maybe I can make-believe that it's just me and her against the world, same as it's always been…

“Anyway, enough of the house. How are you feeling?” Mum asks as she twirls her way over to the floor-to-ceiling, rotting French windows and pushes them – with a struggle – wide open.

“Better,” I tell her. “Maybe I just needed a good sleep.”

To be honest, I haven't slept well for weeks, with the upheaval of Mum and RJ and their whirlwind romance. Though, when I think of it, it's been longer than that. I haven't slept well for months, really.

“Good, I'm glad!” Mum smiles, stepping out on to the terrace. “You must have been exhausted after yesterday's drama, Ellis.”

“Mum, it was hardly a drama,” I say, following her and crossing my arms against the brisk, chilly Scottish wind that's penetrating my layers of clothes. “I was only out for a couple of minutes.”

“A couple of minutes too long for my liking!”
Mum
replies, patting my hand. “I still think I should've taken you to the nearest hospital to get you checked over. I know you've had your funny moments before, but this felt different.”

“The lady in the café said that would've been two hours' drive away, though,” I remind her.

“Hmm. Well, hopefully she's right, and you're just low on iron.”

As I came round yesterday, I'd heard the elderly café waitress tell Mum that both her granddaughters had taken “turns” like this. “Some girls can be prone to it at this age. Anaemia, that is. They grow so fast, you see, and this young lass of yours is certainly big.”

I'm “big”. Urgh. I think everyone thought I'd groaned because I was in pain, but it was the awfulness of that description that hurt me most.

And then things got worse; I was staring up at Mum, the waitress and two inquisitive dogs … but where was the bird-eyed boy? All of a sudden, it dawned on me that my head was in his
lap
, and I scrabbled to my feet quicker than the time Shaniya told me a giant spider had dropped from the ceiling on to my shoulder. (It was a small leaf. Shaniya's idea of a joke; well, it got a big laugh from everyone,
except
me, with my famous “sense-of-humour failure” as Shaniya calls it.)

“I'll be fine. I'll google it, and find out what foods I should be eating,” I assure Mum.

“Well, you won't be able to do THAT till we get the engineer out to fix our internet connection. And I'm not sure how dependable the electrics are … someone's coming to look at those soon, as well as the roofer and builder and plumber…” Mum's voice trails off as she pulls her mobile out of her back pocket and checks her list of whos, whats and whens that'll make the Shiny New Project start to take shape.

While she's momentarily frowning at her phone, I take a minute to gaze around at the grounds. When we arrived yesterday, Mum drove us – in drizzle – through tall, rusted, wedged-open gates, up the driveway, past the grand main entrance and on round to the back door, i.e., the servants' entrance. The drizzle fuzzed up our view, and I was feeling too fuzzed-up inside to be curious. As for Mum, as soon as she saw the removal van already parked up and waiting for us, that was all she could focus on.

“Hmm … I'll be back in a sec, Ellis,” Mum says
absent-
mindedly. “I just want to see if I can get a signal from anywhere upstairs.”

As she turns to go, in the corner of my eye I see the faintest flash of light glimmer, coming from the direction of the garden. I give an involuntary shiver.

“Feeling funny again, babes?” Mum asks, pausing when she spots that tiny movement of mine, the way mothers do.

And as her daughter, I'm pretty sure she's worried that my “turn” had nothing to do with iron or lack of it and everything to do with my “waves” getting worse.

“I'm just a bit cold,” I say quickly. I guess the glimmer must've been a weak gleam of sunshine glinting off something.

“Come on inside, then,” says Mum, ushering me to follow her.

“In a minute,” I tell her. To be honest, I suddenly don't feel like doing every little thing Mum says. I did the big stuff, like letting her move us here, didn't I? That seems like plenty.

Mum frowns, but leaves me to myself. Maybe she's hoping that the healthy Highland air, the bracing breeze of it, will whip away any traces of anxiety. Same as maybe she's hoping I'll take one
look
at all the space – the endless space – we have here compared to our gardenless third-floor flat on our busy street in London and fall in love with Wilderwood as much as
she's
fallen in love with RJ.

It's not going to happen, of course. Wilderwood isn't some wonderland. Just look at the garden directly in front of the terrace; it must have been very grand once upon a time, laid out in four squares of planting. But now the ornamental hedges are overgrown and snarly, and the squares are empty of elegant roses and lilies and rampant with enthusiastic weeds instead.

Beyond that, a vast apron of long grass – dotted with trees and shrubs – extends to the perimeter stone wall. And beyond
that
, endless fir trees stand shoulder to shoulder, like a dense, living fence.

With a shudder, I decide to move on, to walk around the outside of the house and get my bearings. So I let the moss-covered paving stones take me along the front of the house, past more long, dirty, sometimes broken windows. Finally, I come to the corner of the building, the corner of the L. And it's here that I notice a large, lumpen tangle of ivy in the garden, way taller than me and spread wide. What's it covering? Has it grown over years – decades? –
and
ended up smothering some shrubs growing there? Or covered an old garden shed, maybe?

More interestingly, beyond the ivy jungle I can now see part of the driveway, snaking down to meet the tiny single-track road that leads to the village.

The village! If I'm facing in the direction of Glenmill, that means the windows I saw from the Cairn Café – they
have
to be directly above me, in the East Wing; the shorter part of the L. I flip around and look up at the rooms above the kitchens – but I'm too close to the building to see properly.

Taking a step back, and another, and another, I scan the upper floor.

And now I get a better view. Just like you'd expect, the roof of the servants' quarters is pretty plain, except for one pair of windows that have a decorative triangle of stone above them, echoing the style of the main house frontage.

Yes;
they're
the windows that seemed like eerily staring eyes yesterday. But today, from this angle, they're plain and blank. Simple glass in old wooden frames, letting light into a dusty, musty room.

Reassured, and feeling a bit silly, I take
another
step back, and—

Ow!

I've
just been kicked,
hard
, in the back of both knees.

I'm crumpling, tumbling, balance shot and arms flailing to catch hold of something, anything.

And in that split second of sinking, I feel like Alice tumbling into the rabbit hole, bottle-green ivy closing in over me…