Spellbinder (2 page)

The round man had heard the same question a thousand times before.

“Yes,” he said in a voice that conveyed his utter contempt for the questioner while also communicating his profound regret over his career choice. “There is a haunted chamber.”

Excited chatter.

“Which we will see eventually,” he added. “But first—the kitchens.”

He led the way through a door at the far end of the courtyard, while talking about the sequence of construction and the family that built it only to lose their possessions as a result of some less-than-wise investments in merchant ships to the New World, and how that family was replaced by another family that had the wisdom to refrain from dabbling in international commerce, but had the misfortune of being Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I, when such allegiances were regarded as somewhat less than acceptable.

It was all quite interesting, but no one heard a word that he said as he marched on toward the kitchens, nattering away, with his back resolutely turned to his audience. By the time they arrived in the kitchens, everyone’s attention was starting to wander and carefully licked fingers were stretching toward the enormous sugar loaf that served as the chief decoration of the long central table.

“Don’t touch that!”

The fingers shot back, while those who had managed to scratch off a bit of brown sugar grinned at each other conspiratorially. The round man glared for a moment, then directed their attention to the cavernous fireplace and the great black meat spit.

Belladonna looked around nervously, hanging back near the door. She knew that most of the other kids thought she was very strange, but because she was also
the survivor of a Tragic Event, they didn’t give her a hard time. They just left her alone and stared at her when she wasn’t looking, which was actually worse than being the constant target of teasing. At least then she would have felt that she belonged, that she was there, but instead she spent most of her time alone, reading her books and wondering who was real and who was not.

The tour moved on. The round man led the way down a narrow hallway and into a dark, paneled room with equally dark furniture pushed against the walls, then they were off down the hall again and into a bright room with a beautiful plaster ceiling and huge bay windows that were raised like small stages. The sun streamed across the faded carpet and even Belladonna was tempted into the middle of the room and over to the big mullioned windows.

The round man told them all about the ceiling and the small stained-glass coats of arms and then led the way out into the hall and up a narrow, twisting staircase. The clatter of twenty-eight pairs of feet followed him up the stairs and into another long, narrow hallway. They went into a small bedroom, followed by a large bedroom with a vast four-poster bed, and finally into a room with a concealed priest’s hole (fascinating), another four-poster bed, and a cradle.

By this time Belladonna had forgotten about wishing she was back at school and was as eager as anyone else to peer through the small piece of glass into the
priest’s hole, imagining what it must have been like to crouch there listening to the tramp of military feet searching the house for heretics. And she, like everyone else, just had to see exactly how hard the mattress was on the four-poster bed.

“And, of course, this is the haunted room,” intoned the round man.

Everyone stopped poking about and turned to listen.

“In 1632 the Lady Mary was in this room with her baby, waiting for her deadbeat gambling husband to come home, praying that he hadn’t gambled away their home. . . .”

The children were hanging on his every word. The round man loved this part.

“Finally, after two days on the town, she saw him come riding home, around that clump of trees right there. . . .”

Everyone peered out of the window. Mr. Watson stood leaning against the door and rolling his eyes.

“She knew what he’d done, and unable to take the shame of being
thrust
into poverty . . .”

He paused for effect. Twenty-eight sets of eyes grew wider by the second.

“She opened the window,
flung
the baby into the moat, and leapt in after it. And they say . . .”

He paused for effect again, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.

“They
say
she haunts the room to this
very
day,
sitting at the window and rocking the cradle . . . waiting for her husband to return.”

Silence. Everyone looked at the cradle.

The round man straightened up and grinned. “Right, then. Let’s go and see the Great Hall. Follow me!” He marched cheerily through the swarm of children and out of the door.

Mr. Watson straightened up. “Okay,” he said matter-of-factly, “it’s just a story. It has nothing to do with history. Come on. Away from the window.”

Embarrassed giggles, shoves, and whoops as everyone pretended that they thought it was all stupid and had never been fooled even for a moment. Mr. Watson herded them out and set off after the round man.

They had all left the room before Belladonna realized they had gone. She was still at the window, looking down into the long-dry moat. She turned around and, with a leap in the pit of her stomach, realized she was alone. She hurried to the door, but it was too late.

“It wasn’t like that, you know.”

The voice wasn’t angry or outraged, it just stated a fact. “The baby had gone months before. Croup, it was.”

Belladonna turned around slowly.

There, near the window, was a young woman wearing a dark velvet dress decorated with pearls, a red sash, and a huge lace collar. Above the collar rose a swanlike neck ending in a beautiful oval face surrounded by shining blond ringlets.

“And honestly, do you really think a grown person could squeeze themselves out of that window?”

Belladonna Johnson shook her head slowly. “It is rather small.”

“Of course it is,” smiled Lady Mary. “What a sensible girl you are.”

“Thank you,” said Belladonna, staring at her shoes.

There was an awkward pause.

“Ah,” said Lady Mary, suddenly understanding, “this is all a bit new to you, isn’t it?”

Belladonna nodded and glanced up. Lady Mary was staring out of the window again, and when she looked back, she seemed troubled.

“The thing is,” she said, “William is gone.”

Belladonna stared at her. Lady Mary looked a bit exasperated and gestured toward the cradle.

“William,” she repeated, “the baby. He vanished two days ago.”

Belladonna nodded in what she hoped was a sage and knowing manner, because she had no idea where Lady Mary was going with this. Mary tossed her seventeenth-century curls in annoyance.

“Look, just let the Spellbinder know. She’ll know what to do.”

Whatever Belladonna had been expecting Lady Mary to say, it wasn’t that. But she didn’t have much time to think, as the round man suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“Hey, you!” he said. “Everyone’s waiting for you downstairs.”

Belladonna turned back to Lady Mary, who waved her away with a long, pale hand.

“Horrible little man,” she muttered. “In my day, I wouldn’t have let the likes of him cross the threshold. Off you go.”

Belladonna turned and walked to the door. She glanced back to see if Mary was still there. She was.

“Don’t forget to tell the Spellbinder about the baby!”

Belladonna nodded and followed the round man down the stairs, through the Great Hall, and out to the car park.

“Come on, Johnson!” shouted Mr. Watson. “Pick up your feet! Stop dragging along. I’ve never known a girl for hanging back like you.”

He hustled her onto the bus, quickly counted heads, and nodded to the driver that they were ready to go. The engine coughed into action and the old bus heaved itself out of the car park. Belladonna looked back at the house through the streaky window. There was nothing to see, just the same dark, mullioned windows, the dip in the lawn where the moat had once been, and the gleaming white and deep black of the half-timbered walls.

And then it was gone, and they were surrounded by the concrete and brick of the modern city. Belladonna
sighed. Sometimes it really did seem as though she spent more time talking to dead people than living ones. But it was so confusing. And who (or what) on earth was the “Spellbinder”?

The bus screeched to a halt in front of the school. Which was an improvement over the driver on the last trip. That driver had zoomed past Dullworth’s and was headed for the city center before Mr. Morris (who had taken them to the depressing computer assembly plant) had looked up from his science magazine and realized that they were severely off course.

Of course, Dullworth’s was the sort of place it was easy to pass by without ever realizing it was a school. It had been started over a hundred years before by two elderly, energetic sisters who couldn’t understand why boys got to learn interesting things like History and Latin, and girls only got training in sewing, singing, and simpering. But the Dullworth sisters were not the sort who sat around bemoaning the status quo—they were the sort who leapt to their feet and marched about demanding change and scaring the horses. So they bought a house in what was then a quiet part of town and started a school for girls. Eventually the school expanded to occupy three Victorian houses connected by rickety covered walkways, and as the years passed, it finally admitted boys as well. But it still looked like a row of houses, and it felt rather like that too.

Each house had been adapted with classrooms where living rooms, parlors, and bedrooms had once
been, but there was always the feeling that you were wandering around some vast gothic mansion and sooner or later the owner would turn up and demand to know what on earth you were doing there. The hallways were wide and boasted high ceilings and elegant plasterwork, while the classrooms ranged from splendid rooms with views across the grounds to tiny garrets whose windows let out onto the gray rooftops. Staircases popped up everywhere, from the broad flights that led to the science labs and the Head’s office, to narrow, twisting back stairs that had once been the haunt of servants. Even the school hall had once been a ballroom and had a vast domed ceiling, painted midnight blue and stuck all over with large gold-painted plaster stars that periodically crashed to the floor in a hail of dust and tinsel, leaving pale gaps in the artificial firmament.

The rest of the day was fairly ordinary: English Lit., French, and double P.E. (which Belladonna
did
manage to spend in the sick bay—Miss Gunnerson was much more credulous than Mr. Watson). And then it was over and a horde of screaming kids raced out of school and into the late autumn dusk.

Belladonna dawdled home, glancing in shop windows and pausing at the sweet shop on the corner to buy a packet of Parma Violets, pore over the magazines, and pick up a newspaper for her father.

Then she walked past the old launderette. It had stopped being a launderette over a year ago, though
all the machines were still inside. But it wasn’t the rather grubby battalions of old washers and dryers that interested Belladonna; it was Mr. Baxter.

Mr. Baxter had apparently owned the shop a long time ago, and he had never left it. When he appeared in the window, the washers, dryers, soap dispensers, and slowly curling notices about the proprietor’s lack of responsibility in the event that one of his machines ate anyone’s clothes seemed to slowly fade away, and the bare blue walls turned a kind of yellow ochre and gradually filled with shelves from floor to ceiling. Every shelf was laden with bottles, jars, and pots of all shapes and sizes. Belladonna could see a long polished oak counter at the very back of the shop with what looked like a bright brass tea urn taking pride of place. The front window seemed to become misty, and she could just make out “. . . pothec . . .” in very fancy gold lettering across the wavy glass, from which she deduced that Mr. Baxter must have been an apothecary.

She liked Mr. Baxter. He was rather elderly with an impressive head of snowy white hair on top of which perched a red pillbox hat with a large black tassel. He wore a dark red coat, a fine yellow waistcoat, and a splendid black cravat at the neck of his freshly starched shirt.

The first time she saw him he had been at the back of the shop behind the counter and hadn’t seemed
very pleased to be seen. She had looked away quickly and hurried home. But since then he had become much more friendly. He always seemed to be tidying up his window display and always waved cheerily at Belladonna as she passed, as if she were a regular customer. At first, the smile had seemed odd, as if the muscles in his face were unused to stretching upward, and Belladonna thought she caught a glint of something cold in his eyes. She walked past as quickly as she could, but then she noticed that he seemed ever so slightly disappointed.

And why wouldn’t he?
she thought.
The poor man might not even realize he’s dead
. And if she went for nearly two hundred years without seeing another face, maybe her cheek muscles would seize up too.

She began to feel guilty, as if he were a sick relative who she hadn’t visited in the hospital, so one day (after looking around carefully to make sure no one was watching) she smiled back. It seemed to cheer him up no end, and for some reason it cheered her up too. So now she made sure she walked past every day, with her newspaper and her Parma Violets, and no matter how glum she’d been feeling or how dull school had been, Mr. Baxter always made her feel better.

He was there today, true to form, and she waved and he waved back and she carried on with a slightly lighter step, down the High Street, past the church and the graveyard, and up to number 65 Lychgate Lane.

“She’s home!”

Her father poked his head out of the sitting room. And that was the problem right there, really.

Where most fathers would have poked their heads out of the sitting room door, Mr. Johnson poked his right through the middle of the wall.

“Did you bring the paper?”

Belladonna looked at him reprovingly. He immediately vanished back into the sitting room and reappeared in the doorway.