Fiona (3 page)

Poppy and I spend
the morning going over her homework and cautiously getting to know each other. We spread her assignments out in the fifth-floor room that has been designated as her study, right next to her bedroom, a place overwhelmed with pink and ruffles and glitter.

Poppy must be a girly girl. Or, at least, she might have been before her parents' death twisted her into this sullen version of herself.

She doesn't say anything as I examine the family portraits that clutter the top of her dresser: the family in ski gear on top of a pristine white mountain, the family in front of a gigantic Christmas tree, the family in front of the Eiffel Tower. I'm fascinated by the tall woman with the dyed blond pixie cut and calm smile in each of the photos. I've seen plenty of photos of Lily in
the
Daily Mail
and on other gossip sites, and she's elegant and striking from every angle. I can't imagine her being friends with my mother, the woman with hair as wild and untamed as mine and no trace of makeup, who preferred long, flowing cotton skirts over the power-woman sheaths that seemed to have been Lily's uniform.

It takes me a moment to realize that I recognize the tall boy in some of the more recent photos, the bored teenager standing next to his father. He must be Charlie, now twenty-two and head of the family. That curly red-brown hair and new-leaf green of his eyes is horribly familiar.

He's the boy from the pub. The one who sat next to me by the fire and brushed off the girl who had every other guy eating out of the palm of her hand. The one whom I caught looking at me.

Oh my God. I was a total bitch to him. I used the voice Hex had taught me to combat mean girls and drunk boys in high school. He probably thinks I'm insane.

But what was he doing in town? He's supposed to be in Glasgow, doing something with the family paper. Not drinking all alone in a pub a few miles away.

I feel a blush creeping up into my cheeks and keep my head ducked so that Poppy won't see it.

A few hours later, we've gone through every subject and
identified what Poppy needs to work on: history and math. I'll have to brush up on my sixth-grade math skills—or, really, my eighth-grade math skills, since Poppy's school is much more advanced than mine was—but history has always been one of my favorites. Mostly because my mother had such a wonderful way of making the past come alive through her stories. During her good spells, at least.

Mabel knocks on the door just as I'm beginning to tell Poppy the story of William Wallace and the Battle of Stirling Bridge against the English. Poppy is rolling her eyes at my every word, it seems like, but at least she's listening.

“Lunch, Miss Poppy,” Mabel says, her eyes snapping to me. Poppy and I are lying on our stomachs, Poppy's textbooks scattered around us, and it's clear from her pinched look that the prim housekeeper doesn't approve of such a slovenly method of learning.

Poppy pushes herself up and follows Mabel out into the hall. Neither of them looks back at me, but I get up and follow them anyway. We twist down the main staircase, with its perfectly polished wooden rail that I don't dare touch in case I smudge it.

Mabel leads Poppy to the dining room, where a plate with a sandwich and apple slices is waiting for her in front of an overflowing bouquet centerpiece. She turns to me after Poppy is settled. “Follow me,” she says, starting out of the room.

I look back at Poppy, sitting alone and still at the large wooden table, surrounded by glittering silverware. She stares down at her plate, resolutely not looking at me, but her blank expression stops me. “I'll eat here with Poppy,” I say, my tone more forceful than I'd meant it to be.

Poppy glances up at me, her expression carefully guarded, but before Mabel can protest, she nods. The old bat can do nothing but harrumph, very loudly, and saunter off to fetch me a sandwich.

We eat our lunch in silence, silence that seems to grow louder and louder as the minutes drip by. I'm about to start talking about William Wallace again, just to fill the dead air, when Poppy speaks.

“Why did my mum pick you to be my governess?”

I keep chewing for a moment, buying some time.

I could tell her that our mothers were friends, but that would raise more questions, ones I don't want to answer. How much do I want to reveal to this girl? My past is . . . complicated. Personal. And since I have my father's last name, Smith, I don't need to reveal my connection to this place to anybody. So I shrug. “I applied, and I guess she thought I was right for the job.”

Poppy snorts. “Well, she thought wrong. And I don't need a governess anyway.”

I fix my eyes on hers. “My mom died when I was just a bit older than you.”

She looks surprised for a second. Then her guarded expression is back. “How?”

“An accident,” I lie.

“What about your father?” she asks.

I circle my hand around the metal chalice that is much too fancy for well water, the condensation dripping over my fingers. “Never knew him.”

She nods, considering this.

“So I know what you're going through,” I say. “I know how mad you are, and I don't blame you for it.”

She rolls her eyes. “You sound like my therapist.”

I have to laugh. “Yeah, I probably do. The state only gave me one session with a therapist, to evaluate me, but it was memorable. It helped a bit, I think.” Though it was mainly memorable because of the white-hot terror I had felt sitting in front of someone who might be able to see into my mind. Who might tell me that I was just as broken as I feared I was.

I shake the memory off. “How about you take me on a tour of this place after lunch? I'd like to start learning my way around.”

“Have one of the other servants do it,” she mutters, pushing her nearly empty plate away from her.

“I want you to do it,” I say firmly, my tone permitting no arguments.

Again she rolls her eyes, her favorite reaction, but then stands up. “Fine.”

She takes me on a whirlwind tour of the castle, through various guest bedrooms, the study where I bumped into Alice—a room filled with books and maps that used to be her father's and is now her brother's—the library with the grand piano, and other sitting rooms and parlors that I'll probably never be able to find again.

The core of the house is the square tower that was built in the early fourteenth century, Poppy tells me, when the first lord got his title. There are low doorways and half staircases leading to the other wings that were added by later generations, all jumbled together to create one rambling castle.

Next Poppy shows me the room that she says is the most important one in the castle, located directly underneath the medieval tower. She grabs an electric lantern from a shelf at the top of a tight spiral staircase before we inch down stones too shallow for my feet. I grasp the thick rope that serves as a bannister so hard that I'll probably get rope burn.

We enter a dark space, lit only by Poppy's lantern. There's nothing in the cavern but a spindly pole in the middle, and I look around, wondering what I'm missing.

“Mabs would be so mad if she saw you right now,” Poppy says with a smirk.

Mabs?
She calls Mabel
Mabs
? I almost laugh out loud at the nickname. At the idea that that stern, unpleasant woman would have a nickname at all.

“Don't you see what it is?” Poppy asks.

I look back at the pole and step toward it, realizing that it isn't a pole at all but the trunk of a tree. It curves a bit, this way and that, as it reaches from the ground up to the roof, where it ends abruptly.

“Why is there a tree in here?” I ask.

“The legend is that, when the first lord was exploring his new lands, he grew tired and fell asleep under this holly tree. He had a dream that he should build a castle here, and so he did, right around the tree. It's supposedly brought good luck to the family ever since.”

I reach out to touch the smooth, knotted bark, but then pull my hand back after a moment. There's some strange feeling coursing through me, something I'm catching from the thick air of the room. It feels alive somehow. Crackling with energy, power. And watching me.

I shake my head, trying to jolt myself out of my sudden panic.
What's the matter with me?
It's just an old tree trunk, and
I'm a bit dizzy from that staircase, that's all. I'm fine. I straighten my shoulders and take a deep breath.
Fine.

“So why would Mabel be mad at me for not knowing what it was?” I ask, trying to sound normal.

Poppy circles the tree in front of me, swinging the lantern in her hand, creating strange shadows on the wall. “Because she's obsessed with it. She always says we're a lucky family, blessed because of the tree. Anything from surviving a battle to getting a good grade on a test is due to this tree, according to her. It's like she worships it or something.”

I wouldn't have suspected grim, dour Mabel to have such an impractical belief, but then again, there's something about this centuries-old tree trunk in the middle of this night-dark room . . . some unsettling feeling it gives off.

Poppy moves toward the staircase, taking the light with her, and I scurry after her. I don't want to be swallowed up in the shadows.

We climb back up the staircase, and I breathe out all of the unnerving air from the strange room below.

We make our way out of the medieval part of the castle and into a wing built in the seventeenth century, where I find a long, dark corridor lined with dusty portraits, some the size of my head, others larger than life. I spend a few minutes
examining the depictions of men with kilts and women in frothy dresses.

Poppy points to one of a grumpy old man with a top hat and a cane. “My great-great-grandfather,” she says, her voice a startling spark in the cold hall.

“He looks very . . . forbidding.” I frown right back at him.

“My favorite is the Grey Lady,” she says, beckoning me to another portrait. It's one I passed before but didn't pay much attention to: a woman in a soft gray dress, her skin almost the same pale color as the ruffled confection she wears, in front of a mountain landscape backdrop. At first glance I judged her as boring—her pale eyes are blank and stare just past the viewer, it seems. But I notice now a sadness in her slightly parted lips, a haunted look in those eyes that moments before I'd thought to be devoid of character.

“Who was she?” I ask Poppy.

“A great-great-great-aunt or something. I think she lived here in the early eighteen hundreds. She fell in love with a farmer, but her father made her break it off with him since he wasn't a duke or whatever. So she jumped off the roof onto the courtyard and killed herself.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. There have been stories about her ghost haunting this house ever since.”

“Every creaky old house needs a ghost, I guess,” I say with a shrug. For a moment, I imagine this lovesick girl stepping out of her painting and roaming the halls, wringing her hands and sobbing.

Poppy starts walking again, and I pull myself away from the disquieting portrait. She opens a big set of double doors at the end of the hall, and we enter an honest-to-goodness ballroom, a huge space with floor-to-ceiling windows, a shiny parquet floor, and gold-framed mirrors along the walls. I move slowly to the center of the room, my eyes wide as I try to take it all in. My mother used to read Jane Austen novels aloud to me, and whenever there was a scene at a ball, I pictured the ballrooms almost exactly like this. I look up to find a fresco painted on the ceiling, a vision of Aphrodite rising from her clamshell, ringed by cupids and cherubs. The goddess of love, presiding over the most romantic room I've ever seen.

“Mum hosted three balls a year in here for her different charities,” Poppy tells me. “I would hide behind one of the plants,” she says, pointing to a cluster of potted trees and ferns in one corner with a green velvet bench in front of them, “and watch all the women in their ball gowns and all the men in their tuxedos. My mum always threw the most glamorous parties.”

I realize then that, for Poppy, there is no part of this house that isn't filled with ghosts.

She leads me back into the medieval tower and up the staircase to the fifth floor, with her suite of rooms. “This is the family floor,” she says. “Charlie's room is at that end.” She points to the left. “And my parents' room is at that end.” She points to the right. Both of us stare for a moment at the closed double doors at the end of the hall.

“And that's the tour,” she says, flouncing back into her room.

“All right, then. Thank you,” I tell her, but she refuses to look at me. “So what do you usually do on Saturday afternoons?” I ask, making my voice painfully bright and cheery.

She shrugs. “Usually more homework. Or read. Or ride Copperfield, if I have time. I have a big show in a couple of months, so I'm practicing all the jumps with him.”

“How about you introduce me to Copperfield?” I ask. “I've never ridden a horse before.”

“Never?” she asks.

I shake my head with a smile. Despite growing up in a West Texas town with an annual rodeo and more livestock than people, I always managed to avoid horses, scared off by their size and unpredictability. I've never even touched one before.

She almost smiles back, then catches herself. But that brief slip gives me hope.

“I guess we can go see him,” she says with a shrug.

She bounds through the halls and out a back door, hurtling down the hill past various sheds and a tall wall of hedges. “That's the maze,” she says, pointing to it as she strides past.

“A maze?” I ask. I approach the opening in the hedges and see more shrubbery walls inside, and a path leading into the depths. The walls are at least four feet taller than I am.
A place where someone could get thoroughly lost
, I think, and shiver.