The Morrow Secrets (3 page)

‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, watching Cissie’s reaction, ‘is why that old witch is bothering with me. I’m clumsy and I’m careless. She doesn’t think I’m suitable.’
‘You’re the heir to the Morrow family and this old house,’ replied Cissie.
‘Perhaps I’m not,’ said Tallitha, ‘maybe there’s someone else who could take my place?’
Cissie stiffened and began fidgeting with the laundry.
‘Well, is there someone?’ asked Tallitha staring at her nurse.
‘How should I know Miss? And you mustn’t call the Grand Morrow names. Now I must be about my work. I can’t stand here chatting to you all day or Mrs Armitage will be after me.’
With that, Cissie picked up the laundry basket and hurried down the corridor.
Tallitha stared after her. Then there was someone. Cissie was hiding something. It wasn’t just her imagination after all. Cissie was definitely uncomfortable. But what about?
Her great aunt had said, ‘Due to circumstances beyond my control,’ ‘and reasons...’ What reasons? What had she meant by that?
There must be a family secret! Something so big that they were all in on it, even Cissie!
Tallitha hugged herself and smiled a very naughty smile.
She had to find out what the secret was!
Now she had to find her brother.

The children’s apartments were on the second floor of Winderling Spires, at the far end of the east wing, down a long winding corridor and off to the right. Tallitha knew every inch of their corridor, each nooky recess and dark spidery corner. This was the best part of the house, where the grown-ups, apart from Cissie and their servants, never ventured. Tyaas was probably hiding in one of his secret dens. He was particularly fond of piracy and his adventures involved shipwrecked sailors marooned on mythical desert islands. Tallitha searched his encampments, hidden under four poster beds and in musty dressing rooms, tucked away at the back behind the trunks, but all his makeshift camps were empty.

‘Bother Tyaas, where is he?’ she asked herself as she peered under his messy bed.
As Tallitha sat on the floor wondering what to do next she remembered Cissie’s holed stones. The children had a secret way of locating one another when one of them went exploring on their own. It had been Cissie’s idea. She said the stones should be placed in a particular order to indicate where the other one had gone to in the big house. Cissie had some strange country ways. ‘My magic methods,’ she called them and these included her holed stones, which she insisted would protect the children from evil spirits.
Cissie’s grandmother had told her folk tales, about village children being taken away at the dead of night, disappearing from their beds, never to be seen again. Cissie was a superstitious woman and swore on the power of the ‘holed stones’ which she placed outside the children’s apartment to protect them from the dooerlins, or evil spirits, who were said to wander Wycham Elva at night.
Tallitha stepped into the corridor and stared down at the uneven row of roughly hewn stones. The smallest stone had been moved, placed out in front of the others. It was a sign that Tyaas was outside, somewhere in the grounds.
‘Got him!’ she said, feeling pleased with her detective work.
The children’s corridor was unusually quiet on that warm afternoon. As Tallitha stood in the shadows she began to experience an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. Then she heard a shuffling noise behind her. Perhaps she had been followed by a shrove. Damn them! Tallitha’s heart began thumping as she turned around and peered down the corridor.
‘Who’s there?’ she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
She inched forward, screwed up her eyes and stared into the patchy darkness.
‘Come out at once!’ she demanded trying to sound braver than she felt.
Tallitha held her breath as a tall figure stepped out from a doorway. It was Benedict, their slightly older distant cousin. Behind him, just for a fleeting second, Tallitha thought she saw a shrove slipping away into the gloom. She put her hand to her mouth and gasped.
‘Benedict, you gave me such a fright!’
Benedict, or Bumps as they called him, was a swot, much too clever for his own good. Benedict hovered uneasily with his messy fringe falling into his eyes. He pushed it out of the way and it flopped back down again.
‘Are you following me? Was that Marlin with you?’ she ventured, her courage returning.
‘Marlin? No...,’ he said looking quickly behind him, ‘I just wondered what you were doing?’
There was something furtive about Benedict. He was a clumsy boy, always bumping into things, hence his nick-name. He wore sloppy jackets with deep pockets so he could carry around lots of books.
‘Weren’t you going home after class?’ asked Tallitha eyeing him curiously.
Bother Benedict, what did he want? He knew far too much for any normal boy. He wasn’t too bad in small doses, but she must get rid of him so she could find her brother.
Benedict’s home was in a remote part of the country and he had begun to visit Winderling Spires so he could practice his chemistry experiments with Miss Raisethorne, their teacher. It was something he looked forward to immensely. Fumbling awkwardly he pulled a notebook from one of his pockets.
‘I forgot my experiment write-ups. I wanted to work on them later,’ he said shaking the book for effect and blushing, realising how his studiousness would come across to Tallitha. ‘I know what you think, but I like science,’ Benedict stammered.
‘Never mind Bumps, I suppose we all like different things but I must be off, too many things to do.’ With that she hurried past him.
Benedict felt foolish. His cousins always made him feel that way. He never knew how to be their friend as well as their cousin. He stood, watching Tallitha, wishing he had a brother or a sister to share secrets with and to take his side against the grown-ups.
As Tallitha ran along the corridor she wondered why Benedict had been following her. She hastily looked over her shoulder. In the gloomy recess of the hallway, he was still standing there, watching her.

*
The gardens at Winderling Spires were a mixture of formal lawns, extravagant shrubbery and colourful flower beds with acres of unkempt

grasslands full of wild flowers and clumps of woodland. The grounds were tended by a team of Skinks, willowy creatures who lived in the gardens, camping in treehouses whilst working at the Spires. In winter they returned to their forest home, only coming back to Winderling Spires when the spring came and they needed work.

Tallitha guessed where Tyaas would be. They had taken over an abandoned treehouse where they kept their secret possessions. It was hidden above the lower branches and the children were certain no one in the family knew of its existence. It was a mess. Tyaas had been there earlier, rummaging in their boxes. They were usually meticulous about hiding their treasures so something must have made him leave in a hurry. As Tallitha began clearing away, she noticed a chalk mark, pointing in the direction of the house.

Tallitha parted the overhanging branches to get a better view of Winderling Spires. She scanned the roofline and the turrets for any sign of movement. Then she saw something. There it was again, high up on the roof, just behind the battlements. From the distance of the treehouse she could see something moving about on the roof. It was someone’s head, bobbing up and down behind the battlements. Tallitha needed no further encouragement. If Tyaas could break the rules so could she!

The hall was empty when Tallitha crept beside the grandfather clock, tick-tocking its deep melodic sounds in the stillness of the warm day. She hid in the shadows then tiptoed quickly across the parquet floor and flew up the grand central staircase.

‘Goodness,’ she said, out of breath, stepping on the bottom stair tread and gazing wistfully at the unexplored world high above her.
The staircase twisted like the branches of a gnarled old tree, disappearing into the shadows of the enormous house. But the main staircase was always busy and Tallitha knew she would have to discover another way up to the roof. She slipped past the schoolroom and down a series of corridors until she came to one of the enclosed wooden staircases which were a feature of the Spires. Quick as a flash she stepped inside the dark closet, closed the door behind her and ran up the next two flights of stairs trying to suppress the rising excitement bubbling away inside her.
There, she had done it at last! She had made it to one of the forbidden floors.
On the dark landing, faded velvet curtains draped the many archways and dusty chandeliers hung from ornate painted ceilings. At the head of the stairs a large stuffed raven sat proudly on a stone plinth, its cold beady eyes dark and alert following her every step.
Stupid dead bird, it’s watching me, thought Tallitha as she shivered and brushed past it.
The house meandered on through a maze of dingy corridors offering tantalising possibilities for exploration yet always tinged with an atmosphere of gloom. Long shadows leached out from the darkened stairwells, each one holding the spectre of a shrove, waiting to leap out and apprehend her. Tallitha kept to the centre of the corridors, avoiding the darkest recesses and piecing together the layout of the house from Cissie’s bedtime stories. Despite Cissie’s repeated warnings, Tallitha knew just where she was headed, to the west side of the house, to one of the least used parts and one of the most isolated.
At last, there before her was the gloomy entrance to the Raven’s Wing, built by one of her Morrow ancestors. The heavy wooden door creaked open to reveal an entrance hall bathed in shadow and populated with lonely statues covered in dust sheets. Weak shreds of daylight poked through dirty windows and layers of ancient cobwebs floated like ghostly gossamer in the draughty hallway becoming entangled in Tallitha’s hair.
‘Ugh, disgusting!’ she cried as she frantically tried to free herself from the clinging webs.
The wing wore a shade of worn-out grey as though the colour had been washed out of the long flowing curtains and sucked from the huge tapestries, turning them into a ghostly hue. Tallitha crept up the stone staircases and explored ice-cold tower rooms, peeking into the dark past of the people who had once occupied the mysterious wing. Closets were filled with ancient garments and dismal bedchambers led on to enormous salons laid out for long forgotten banquets. It was a place frozen in time and Tallitha felt like an intruder, poking around in the murky past of the Morrow clan.
Suddenly, a door banged in the wind and strange wailing sounds began to seep through the corridors as if the house had begun to moan and sing for her.
‘Who’s there?’ she gasped, ‘please, come out and let me see you.’ But her small voice disappeared into the vast, unwelcoming space.
Unearthly melodies moaned round every corner, getting louder and louder.
‘Please! Stop!’ she screamed, trying to block out the eerie chorus.
Tallitha fled up the next staircase, trailing her fingers along the banister, leaving a snail-trail pattern in the dust and trying to disentangle herself from the clawing, grasping cobwebs that hung down all around her. The fine threads stuck to her fingers and as she brushed them away they turned into a discoloured stain. They clung to her hands and lodged in her hair and the more she rubbed at the stains the darker and the redder they became. Suddenly a rippling, tingling sensation began flooding through her body. A surge of energy filled every part of her, snapping away. The corridor began to whirl before her eyes throwing up spectral ghostly faces from the past. Time and space altered before her eyes, the light flickered uncontrollably. Then she entered another world.
When Tallitha opened her eyes everything seemed much brighter. She could smell the woody aroma of fires burning in the grates and hear laughter filtering up from empty rooms. She clutched her head, remembering her dreamlike state and the ghostly apparitions that had appeared before her. Now the Raven’s wing looked strangely familiar as though she had slipped into another time when it had been inhabited by the ancestral Morrow family. Her imagination must be playing tricks on her! She had to get out of there! She had to find Tyaas!
Tallitha ran to door, leaving the eeriness of the Raven’s Wing behind her. Cissie had been right. She shouldn’t have gone there. The wing was possessed by something unspeakable. Cissie had warned her again and again. But even in that moment, something compelled her to turn around and take one final peek. There in the shadows she saw the wizened face of a shrove, his twisted lips smirking and his blackened fingers gripping the edge of the door, then banging it with a resounding thud behind her.
‘Ohh no, ‘she gasped, turning to flee from the evil place.
It was Marlin‒he was following her! She had to get away from him.
Tallitha ran further up into the shadows of the enormous house until at last she found herself at the very top of Winderling Spires.

The house was spookily silent on the uppermost floor of the Spires. Tallitha caught her breath and peered over the banister past all the twists and turns of the staircase, making a zigzag pattern into the distance. At the top of the house the grand landings and corridors were replaced with narrow passageways which Tallitha followed until she found what she was looking for, a small wooden door to one of the hexagonal turrets. She stepped inside and forced opened the stiff outer door to the roof. Cool fresh air rushed into her lungs and savagely whipped her clothes in all directions.