Haunted (12 page)

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Daily functioning at the manor appears to have stopped
abruptly sometime in the mid-1850s, as the town tax records
show no income from servant wages starting in July 1856. A
study of the
Grenshire Argus
microfilms from this period
indicate no untoward or calamitous event to explain the shift.

 

—From Trudy Bilkington's sociology senior thesis,
2008, University of York

W
e forced ourselves to return to the manor.

It was insane.

A madhouse. Bedlam. So much commotion I hadn't been aware of before.

“What
is
all this?” asked Miles.

Each of the hundreds of windows glowed. The large bay windows outlined in lead, the tiny windows that lit the cramped back stairways servants traveled, the full-moon-shaped windows that made a heads-up coin out of the person who looked out them . . . all lit. The attic windows with gables above them, the gallery of windows that turned a hallway into an ocean liner, even probably the window Eleanor Darrow had scratched her agonized message into . . . all blazed through the darkness.

Through each window we could see frenetic motion, servants dashing from room to room, opening curtains, closing them. The darkening grounds were busy, too, with men carrying bundles from unseen carriages into the house, and the gardeners hoeing, pruning, planting. Everywhere children of all ages nipped at their heels, racing in circles, laughing . . . or solemnly stared out the windows at us, disturbed.

Wanting to make sure Tabby was all right, I motioned for Miles to follow me into the modern apartment. Upon entering, I quickly realized it hadn't always been modern, for there were servants and children here, too. We watched incredible activity: children running. Jumping off furniture. Girls in their petticoats, spinning in a circle to hear the fabric swish against their hips. Boys in their short pants and sturdy leather shoes. They played marbles, rolling the gaseous atmospheres of glass planets across the floor. They played statues, trying and failing to remain motionless.

They bounced a red ball back and forth, in the timeless pattern of childhood, the dull thud of the bounce produced for centuries. Pretended to waltz, half graceful, half clumsy, curling their hands around their partner, the air. Chased each other, dove under furniture, charming, oblivious. And all of them, despite their feverish activity, despite all the noise they could generate—all of them paper-thin and not quite there.

I couldn't pretend that I didn't realize that every single one of those children had been as precious to their family as Tabby was to mine. I looked at Miles sadly and bit my lip.

Adding to the teeming noise, servants stepped around the children, muttering to themselves.

“Ahhh,” one moaned as she bustled past me with a pail full of coal. “We should tell, we should get help.”

“We never lifted a finger,” said another, who was carrying folded linens so high they nearly blocked her face. “We are damned for all eternity. The children!”

“The children!”

Every voice was whispering about the infants of the household, and with a clench of fear in my stomach, I understood why. The servants saw what was happening with Madame Arnaud, but were powerless to stop her. Guilty, shamed ghosts. Damned for all time.

They wrung their rotten hands, they hid their faces in their aprons. They bumped into each other in a haze of distress, wailing their repetitive wails.

The dire chorus was horrible, and we walked past them through the living room and down the hallway. As we passed the kitchen, I saw something extraordinary. Something . . . perfect.

My mom.

It was fairly quiet in there; in Madame Arnaud's day it must've been a chamber few had access to, the original kitchen being located down a level. Compared to the odd children who flickered through, casting amazed glances at the grandeur they still saw, Mom was a beacon of solidity. Her skin glowed with warmth, vitality . . . next to her, the others looked like sheets coming out of a printer whose ink cartridge was running out.

As she washed dishes in the sink, lightly humming to herself, she was so majestically beautiful I could have wept. Her gentle eyes focused on her task, and her graceful fingers moved the sponge around the lip of glasses and into their depths, carefully settling the glasses into the rinse water on the other side.

With my new knowledge, my mom was riveting, a show I could watch forever. I grabbed at Miles's hand: Could he see how spellbinding she was? He squeezed back, but I didn't bother to look at him. My eyes were all for her.

She worked on a pot next, scrubbing so hard the muscles in her forearm flexed. She was strong, she was good.

She was the person I loved more than anyone else on earth.

It had taken death for me to realize that.

I loved Steven and my real dad, and I loved Tabby. Bethany was my closest friend. But in the midst of all my teenaged angst and my rejection of Mom as someone who didn't “get” me, she was always the one I loved the most.

And now she'd never look me in the eye again.

This hit me almost harder than knowing I was dead.

Mom had cheered me on for everything I'd ever done. I could remember her sitting on the floor helping me build towers with wooden blocks, laughing her head off when I pushed them over. She took me to playgrounds and hovered nearby, making sure I was safe as I climbed the structures and hurtled down slides. As I got older, she would hug me from behind as I sat at the kitchen table doing my homework, just a silent, wordless way of her saying she loved me.

They say memory is a collage some artist of the cerebrum creates. I was experiencing it now, brief glimpses of her scolding me; of her pretending to collapse in the snow from some lame snowball I'd thrown; of her letting me use lipstick for the first time, watching in the mirror with an amused grin.

She was holding out a broom for me to sweep up the shards of something I'd broken; she was dancing to a CD of Busy Dick I'd brought home, her eyes widening with shock at the lyrics; she was on the sofa, sick herself for once, while I brought her ginger ale and crackers.

She was angry, she was sad, she was euphoric—and through it all, her eyes glowed with love for me. She loved me so much, her eyes had developed particular wrinkles from the smiles she'd given me ever since I was a baby.

I stepped closer, releasing Miles's hand, and stood next to her at the sink. I couldn't tell what she was humming. I sank sideways, waiting for her solid warmth to support me, to prop me up. But I nearly fell.

“We should look for Tabby,” Miles reminded me.

I stared at Mom's profile, her mind busy. What was she thinking about? She had found some comfort doing this mundane task. Her mind was not on me. This was one of the rare moments she had discovered, in which she was free of sadness.

Those moments would be occurring more frequently as the months and years went by.

“Mom, don't forget me!” I cried, and she reacted not a stitch.

“Phoebe, don't,” said Miles softly.

Mom drained the sink, the water gurgling loudly as it circled around and disappeared. She rinsed her hands of soap and took a clean dishcloth from a drawer by the stove. She moved unerringly, without thought. Wow. We'd been here long enough . . .
they'd
been here long enough . . . that it was second nature to grab a dish towel from a previously unknown drawer. This was becoming home to her.

And it had nothing to do with me.

“Let's go,” urged Miles. “We need to make sure Tabby's okay.”

“I can't leave,” I whispered.

“You have to,” insisted Miles. “Remember what you said. If Madame Arnaud takes Tabby, then your mom will have suffered two deaths.”

I whirled around and looked at him. So cruel, such cruel words! But the kindness on his face reminded me that he was only parroting back what I had said.

One by one, Mom replaced the glasses and dishes in the cupboards, and pulled open a drawer to lay the silverware in their separate compartments. A lock of hair fell out of her too-short ponytail. She was still young for someone with a teenaged daughter. Correction: for someone who'd lost a teenaged daughter.

I let Miles wrap an arm around my waist and pull me away from that most beautiful of sights, my gorgeous mom washing the counters. We went down the hall.

Tabby was in her crib as Steven sat in the armchair nearby, reading by the dim light of a lamp. It was one of those nights when she'd been fussy, maybe fighting off a cold—she just needed someone to sit in the room with her while she slept. I'd done it myself several times. It wasn't so bad, reading, listening to her light snore, and saying, “It's okay, I'm here; go back to sleep” when she'd periodically wake up.

So Miles and I relaxed. Madame Arnaud would never dare come to take Tabby while Steven kept vigil. Miles and I sat on the floor, talking. I twitched every time Steven turned a page.

“So how does Madame Arnaud see me?” I asked. “I'm a ghost to her.”

“I don't know,” said Miles. “I guess she's sensitive. A psychic or something.”

“What are we going to do? We can't communicate with the living or even touch them.”

“There has to be something, and we'll figure it out,” said Miles firmly.

I had a funny thought. We'd tried for so long to retrieve Eleanor Darrow's diary to show it to my parents; maybe it was time to retrieve Eleanor herself.

 

The next morning, Miles and I stayed close to my family. I knew he probably wanted to go home (or whatever verb now replaced
go
for us, to describe the way we simply
were
somewhere else instantly, the way you are in dreams). He doubtless wanted to see his mom and dad now that he knew the truth and everything had changed. I wasn't sure how long he'd been dead, or where he went when he wasn't with me, other than driving and re-driving that one stretch of road. Maybe he even wanted a moment with Gillian again, to try to find the closure she just couldn't give him.

But he stayed with me as I watched my family with a degree of fascination I'd never felt when I was alive. Every nuance of expression on Mom's face now left me slack-jawed with wonder and loss. As she walked from the counter to the table with milk for Tabby, I examined her with the same avid interest a lover would . . . the sway of her hips, the slight movement of her hair, the almost inaudible sigh she made as she sat.

The same with Steven. Although our stepdad-stepchild relationship had been a little troubled, suddenly I loved every stubbled inch of his face, the pale gray of his eyes, even the smears on his glasses that needed cleaning. I felt a bit of a draw back to my real dad, but couldn't bear to leave Mom.

And I felt a strong connection to Tabby. The sister I'd been exasperated with in life, who grabbed all my mom's attention right when I entered the tough years of puberty and needed her most . . . I wished I could go back in time and be nicer to her. I had smiled and sung and carried her . . . but lots of times I'd ignored her fussing as I sat inches away texting Bethany or Richard.

“I wish I could save you,” I whispered.

“Don't start crying again,” warned Miles. “Let's go find Eleanor like you suggested.” He stood by Steven, who was eating his toast standing up, waiting for the coffeemaker to finish filling the carafe.

Before I'd realized I was dead, I would sit down at the breakfast table with them and somehow not notice that food never appeared for me—and neither did I want it. But now even sitting was a concept for the living. I just
was
.

“If we
can
do something, why has Madame Arnaud lived for hundreds of years?” I asked, as a way of delaying leaving. Tabby was here; she was safe. We could just stay and watch Mom. “All these servants walking around blaming themselves for not acting when they were alive—don't you think they'd have done anything they could afterward?”

Miles chewed on his lower lip. “The people who served in the last few centuries lived in a very different England. No access to education, and a lot of access to a class system that ensured they felt inferior. Perhaps they thought they were too powerless to even try.”

“They've felt powerless for over two hundred years, some of them?” I asked in disbelief. “They have nothing to lose.”

“You say that from a twenty-first-century perspective,” he said. “Their lives—and apparently their deaths, I see—were very different.”

As if to illustrate his point, one blundered in just then. She was slender to the point of emaciation, and her cap slumped over what must be a thinned collection of once-lush hair. She nervously ran her lye-reddened hands down the white field of her apron.

“Miss,” she implored me. “I can't find Cook to get me orders.”

“I . . . don't know,” I said. I felt a cold jolt of sensation to be directly addressed by a ghost. I couldn't think of Miles that way, but she certainly fit the description. She was harried and upset, as ghosts are reputed to be, and in old-fashioned clothes to boot.

“But I've been sairchin' and sairchin' . . . nigh onto . . .” Her voice dwindled and I saw the horrifying realization cross her face that she'd been searching for Cook for centuries.

“See?” said Miles. “She's spending her afterlife trying to find someone to tell her what to do.”

“Shh!” I said. “She can hear you!”

“She may never find Cook,” he said. “Tucked away in the kitchens, the cook might've been oblivious to the evils of the house. When she died, she may have gone on to a peaceful place.”