Brightwood (2 page)

Daisy didn't know what her mum was trying to catch. She thought the paintings were wonderful. But her mum kept all of them in her bedroom, stacked up with their faces to the wall.

This was the only exception. It was a portrait of Daisy sitting in the meadow, with her lap full of flowers. Behind her was Brightwood Hall, with all its chimneys and decorative details outlined against the sky. The painting wasn't completely realistic, because her mum had painted the ocean in the distance even though you couldn't see it from the house in real life. A tiny glittering boat floated on the far horizon. If you peered hard enough, you could see something written on the side of it.

The
Everlasting.

The word gave Daisy a strange, sad feeling. Her mum had lost almost her whole family in an accident on that boat.

But that was long ago. And her mum didn't think about it much, because she hardly every mentioned it. Daisy turned her gaze to her mum's signature at the bottom of the painting:
Caroline Fitzjohn.

She would be home soon, Daisy thought as she went out the front door, pulling the wagon behind her. All the way down the drive, she expected to see her mum coming back, the big blue car loaded up with boxes of laundry soap and kitchen towels and tubs of coffee, with the little toy kitten that hung from the rearview mirror swaying to and fro. When Daisy was small, that tiny plush kitten, with its gray fur and blue eyes, was her favorite toy. One day, in a fit of generosity, she'd wrapped it up in a bit of leftover Christmas wrapping paper and given it to her mum. Her mum hadn't asked her whether she was sure she wanted to part with it. But her mum knew the gift was a big deal. She had tied a blue ribbon around the kitten's waist and hung it from the mirror in her car. It always made Daisy smile to see the kitten as her mum's car came up the bumpy driveway towards the house.

There was no car today. Just the path and then the tall gates surrounded by trees. The gates were so finely wrought and so elaborately designed, they looked like sheets of lace. But they were made of iron and extremely strong. Tall pedestals stood on either side, with a stone lion on the top of each one. The lion on the left was called Regal and the one on the right was Royal. When they had been new, they had been identical, although time and the weather had changed their expressions. Now Regal appeared stern, almost angry. And there were dark markings on Royal's cheeks that looked like tears.

The lions always said the same thing.

“Beware!” Regal warned.

“Be careful!” Royal wept.

Daisy rested her hand on the padlock that held the gates shut and stared out into the road beyond. There was nothing to see. She didn't open the gates and go outside because she wasn't allowed to. She was never allowed to.

She had been born in one of the dozens of bedrooms in Brightwood Hall. And in the whole of her life, she had never once set foot outside.

TWO

There were two worlds in Daisy's life. There was the outside world and there was the world of Brightwood Hall. And only Brightwood Hall, with its labyrinth of rooms, its many animals, its ancient trees and secret corners, seemed quite real to her.

She could see the outside world. But it felt like a faraway place. Daisy knew there were towns and cities out there, rivers and mountains, millions of people living their lives, although she knew about them only from pictures in books and in stories she had read. She was curious, of course, and the older she got, the more questions she had. But the answers to the questions seemed as unreal as the outside world itself. Brightwood Hall was the only place she had ever known or felt a part of. And now she stood at its gates, staring out like a fish in a pond might stare at the strange and distant bank.

She turned at last and started back towards the house.

Maybe Mum forgot something at the store and had to go back.

It was an obvious explanation. Her mum couldn't call the house and tell her because she didn't have a phone anymore. She had stopped using it about three years ago, around the same time that she got rid of the television. Daisy had been sorry when the television went. She had watched cartoons on it and shows about wild animals. Then her mum said they didn't need it any longer.

“It's easy to waste far too much time with things like that,” her mum had said. “Television, phones, computers . . . ”

“What are computers?” Daisy wanted to know.

Her mum didn't seem to hear the question. “People spend almost their whole lives looking at screens. They turn into strangers, like zombies.”

Daisy thought this sounded frightening, although she still didn't know what it had to do with shows about wild animals. She didn't ask. Her mum looked away, her eyes distant, and Daisy could tell she didn't want to talk about it anymore.

She decided to get on with her schoolwork until her mum came back. Daisy wriggled and climbed her way across the Marble Hall and went into the ballroom. It was the second largest room in Brightwood Hall, and it was crammed wall to wall with furniture that had been removed from the rest of the house to make space. Ornate plaster decorations covered the ceiling, and the sunlight fell in stripes through tall windows. You could see most of the eastern side of the grounds of Brightwood Hall from here: the walled gardens, the topiary, and a stretch of the Wilderness.

The furniture in the ballroom was covered with white dustcovers. Daisy thought the covers made everything look like a picture she had once seen of the Arctic. If she squinted, she could imagine that the tables and chairs were snowy peaks with long valleys, full of shadow.

The only thing not covered was a desk by the window. Daisy sat down and gathered up her books.

It was Monday, which meant she had history and then math, followed by English. Her mum taught her all the subjects and was very organized about it. They used books from the house's huge library. At the moment, they were learning about the Romans. Daisy liked the Romans. Their buildings reminded her of Brightwood Hall, with its four great columns at the entrance and the triangular pediment set high up on the front. She turned to the next chapter, which was all about gladiators, and spent half an hour reading and taking notes.

She wasn't nearly so interested in math. She opened the textbook unwillingly and forced herself to concentrate. It was algebra. Her mum said most kids didn't study that until they were twelve or older, although that didn't mean much to Daisy. The whole idea of kids her age was a bit like algebra itself: hard to keep straight because there was nothing real attached to it. She sighed and tapped her pencil against the page.

Her mum usually helped her with the harder problems. Daisy glanced at her watch. It was nearly one o'clock.

Maybe she got a flat tire and had to wait for it to be fixed.

Daisy abandoned the last few problems and moved on to English. They were reading
Macbeth
by somebody named William Shakespeare. The words were hard and Daisy often felt confused. Normally, her mum spoke the lines out loud, explaining what the words meant as she went along. Sometimes she got up from her chair on the other side of the desk and paced slowly among the white shrouded furniture, her hands gesturing and her voice full of feeling.

But her mum wasn't here. Daisy stared hard at the page.

“
Confusion now hath made his . . . masterpiece,
” she ventured, her voice coming out in a whisper.
“Most sac . . . sac . . . sacrilegious . . .
”

The clock in the distant drawing room chimed. It was half past one already. She had heard the sound ten thousand times, but it had a different voice today. As if it were calling to remind her of the quietness of the house and how alone she was.

She considered going into the kitchen to see if Tar was around. He had been particularly talky that morning. That was because her mum wasn't there. Her mum didn't like it when she talked to animals and objects, although she had liked it when Daisy was small.

“What an imagination you have!” she used to say when Daisy gave the hedgehogs names or had a long conversation with a tree or with one of the many statues that dotted the grounds of Brightwood Hall. Daisy preferred talking to these things rather than to her dolls, all of whom were rather dull.

“All they do is drink tea and argue about who has the nicest hair,” she complained. “And the biggest one, Janice, is so bossy. She thinks she's better than the others because she's the only one who's still got her knickers.”

Her mum had laughed out loud. “It's amazing how you bring things to life!”

Daisy hadn't thought she brought things to life. She'd thought everything was already alive. Not just plants and animals, but also twigs and pebbles and stars and every last one of her toys.

A part of her still thought the same way. That everything had a secret life of its own, with its own thoughts and feelings. It was as if there were a gap—perhaps as narrow as a crack in the path or as wide as the meadow itself—between what was real and what was not.

Her mum used to like her talking to things, but not any longer. Now it seemed to worry her.

Daisy turned her gaze to the many photographs and portraits that hung from the walls of the ballroom. They were mostly pictures of former Fitzjohns. Many had been great men and women in their time. There was Emily Fitzjohn, the famous campaigner for women's rights, and Talbot Fitzjohn, who had been ambassador to China, and Harry Herbert Fitzjohn, a champion swimmer. Daisy's favorite was the celebrated explorer Sir Clarence Fitzjohn, who had lived a hundred and fifty years ago. He had been knighted after his daring attempt to travel around the world in a hot-­air balloon. The picture of Sir Clarence was in black and white. He was wearing a strangely shaped helmet and standing with one foot on the head of a tiger that he had just shot. Sir Clarence had mounted expeditions to the North Pole, Mount Everest, and Papua New Guinea, but he had spent most of his life searching the Amazon for the Lost City of Valcadia, which was said to be made entirely of silver. Nobody knew if Sir Clarence ever found the city, because he disappeared somewhere in the jungles of Brazil and was never heard from again.

Not all the Fitzjohns had been as admirable as Sir Clarence. One had been hung for murder and another had been an infamous traitor. Several had been notorious for their cruelty. Like the General, they all had The Crazy.

“It runs through our family,” Daisy's mum had explained.

“What is it?” Daisy wanted to know.

Her mum shook her head. “I don't know for sure,” she said. “The people who have it are born different . . . wrong.”

“Don't worry,” she'd added, seeing Daisy's anxious face. “It hasn't appeared for a long, long time.”

Daisy closed her book and placed it back on the desk. There was no point trying to go on with her schoolwork. She was far too distracted.

Maybe Mum felt sleepy, so she stopped for a nap.

But this explanation, like all the others, suddenly seemed thin and unconvincing. For the first time, Daisy wondered whether something else had happened to her mother.

Something bad.

THREE

Daisy thought the best thing to do was to act as if nothing were wrong. If she treated the day as if it were perfectly normal, perhaps the day would realize it had made a mistake and go back to
being
normal.

In the afternoon, her mum usually set up her easel to paint, and Daisy played or worked on one of her animal projects. At the moment, she was studying the peacocks. When her mum had been a little girl, the peacocks of Brightwood Hall had been three pairs of standard Indian blues. Now there were more than a hundred birds and they were all different: blue blotched, black barred, mixtures of silver, bronze, and green. One was completely white with an emerald crest, another brown and drab looking except for a cloak of gold over its shoulders. They lived in the Wilderness, a huge overgrown expanse on the northern side of the estate.

Daisy fetched her notebook and went down the path by the west wing, with the lake on her left and the statue of the Hunter directly ahead of her in a little circle where the path widened. She stopped when she got to him and reached up to touch his foot. The Hunter stared into the distance with one arm flung out and the other at his shoulder, reaching for his bow. He was leaning forward, one leg bent, the other lifted, as if he had just at that moment broken into a run. His face was smooth and beautiful.

“What do you see today?” Daisy asked him.

“Far horizons,” the Hunter said. “Strange shores.”

It was difficult getting any real information out of the Hunter because he was so poetic.

“When you say ‘strange,' ” Daisy attempted, “do you mean strange as in weird, or do you just mean strange as in new to you? And where are you looking?”

“Forward, ever forward, beyond the mists of time . . . ”

Daisy felt a bit sorry for the Hunter. He could never say anything directly. He could speak only in the grandest and most complicated language.

She carried on down the path and then through the bushes that fringed the Wilderness, retracing a route where the undergrowth had been pushed aside. There was a clearing where the peacocks liked to roost, high in the trees. Daisy sat down with her back against a tree trunk and made herself as still as she could.

In a little while, three of the birds made their way into the clearing: two females, pecking and peering, and a male with a greenish breast and white crest. Daisy made a note of the time and place in her book and then a description of their coloring.

For all their glory, they were lazy creatures. Their nests were just little holes they scraped in the earth, and they would rather run than fly. The fattest ones got eaten by the fox.

Daisy liked this area of the Wilderness because the Christmas tree was there. She glanced across at it now. The tree had grown faster than her. It was already twice her height. Last year, even her mum wasn't tall enough to fix the star on the top without a ladder. When the tree was decorated, it was a beautiful sight, all lit up among the dark trees. They scattered grain and dried fruit for the animals, and hung balls of seed so that birds would come and perch among the branches, as if they were Christmas decorations themselves.

“Are we the only people who have a Christmas tree?” Daisy had once asked.

“Oh no. Lots of people get them to put in the house.”

“The
house
? How do the animals get their treats?”

Her mum had smiled at that and squeezed her hand.

Back then, she could talk to her mum about anything. Her mum told her stories about when she was a little girl, when Brightwood Hall was full of people and laughter. The meadow was still a lawn then, the grass kept short by a dozen gardeners, and the Wilderness was a well-­tended woodland, covered by bluebells in the spring.

In those days, her mum slept in a bedroom with a garden painted on the walls, and the rest of the house was equally beautiful. The Fitzjohn silver was always polished and the windows gleamed. There were parties, her mum said. Such parties! The women wore dresses all the way down to the ground and danced through the night in the ballroom.

“Where did they put all the covered-­up furniture?”

“It wasn't there. The ballroom was perfectly empty.”

“Did you wear a long dress? Did you dance too?”

“I wasn't allowed to stay up so late . . . ”

But now that Daisy was older, her mum didn't seem to like her asking so many questions. Sometimes when Daisy was talking, her mum's face would change, and if Daisy didn't stop, she would start to run the heel of her slender hand against her forehead, over and over again. And whatever Daisy was talking about would lose all meaning, as if her mum were rubbing the words away.

It was much easier to keep quiet and talk instead to Little Charles or Tar or the peacocks.