The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall (12 page)

Her brown eyes are soft with hope and excitement.

“To America?” I repeat with surprise.

In this long-ago time, a poorly paid housemaid like Flora would barely travel further than the local village on a rare day off, surely.

“It's the truth, I tell you!” she says, a smile lighting up her face. “When I was on the stairs just now, I heard Mr Stewart the butler talk of it to the governess. The whole household is to be packed up
next
week and we are to travel –
by train
– to the master's house in London. London! And from there we will go on to Southampton and then sail on a fine ocean liner all the way across the Atlantic, to New York. Can you imagine?”

“That sounds wonderful!” I say, genuinely excited for Flora. It's a trip
I
would be happy with, travelling first south, then away to somewhere so exciting, leaving drab, lonely Wilderwood behind. “I haven't been to New York, but London is amazing.”

“You have visited it?” Flora asks in amazement.

“Until a few days ago, I lived there,” I tell her.

“Oh, my! What is it like? Are there many fine buildings? Have you travelled on the Underground railway? Is it terribly fast?”

“Um, London is a very busy but interesting place,” I begin, trying to answer all her quick-fire questions in order. “And yes, lots of the buildings are beautiful, but some areas are poorer, and the buildings aren't so grand. And yes, I've been on the Underground loads of times. It is fast, but it's just like being on a tram or a bus without the views.”

This is fun. I thought talking about the future would frighten Flora. But so much of London is the same as it would have been in her time.

“
And what of King George?” asks Flora. “Have you ever seen him?”

Of course … certain places in London might have survived for a century or even more, but
people
wouldn't have.

“He's not around in my time,” I say gently, trying to pick my words carefully so they're not too shocking. “I did stand outside Buckingham Palace on a school trip once, and we all thought we'd seen the queen at a window, but it probably wasn't her.”

“The queen?” squeaks Flora, dropping her bread uneaten in her lap.

“Queen Elizabeth. The second Queen Elizabeth. I think your King George was maybe her grandfather?”

As I try in vain to remember anything I've learned or heard about British kings and queens, I feel Flora gather my hands in hers. As before, I'm guiltily aware of the rough, parched feel of her hard-working skin on my smooth fingers.

“Oh, Ellis,” she says, smiling earnestly at me, “I still don't understand how it is that you can be here, but I feel that you have perhaps brought me luck! Because you
are
the shadow from my dreams, aren't you?”

“
Look, I'd be very glad to think I've brought you luck, but I really don't feel I am some ‘shadow',” I say, feeling confused, and a little uneasy again.

But perhaps I
have
been appearing to her, without being aware of it. If
I
can hear whisperings through time in the walls and floors of Wilderwood Hall, why isn't it possible that Flora would dream of me?

You know, maybe
I'm
some modern-day seer, without even knowing it. Maybe I inherited some second sight or something from a grandmother, same as Flora did!

Hey, it's a nice idea, but I doubt it. I've never met my dad's mum, of course, but my gran in Australia is about as psychic and spiritual as a paving stone.

The truth is, I don't know what anything means any more.

All I know is that with my everyday life feeling so tilted and strange right now, being with Flora is – bizarrely – the closest thing I have to normal.

“But do you not think it is wonderful that I dreamt of you, Ellis?” says Flora, her eyes wide and insistent. “
I
do. My friend from the future, my bringer of luck, twin of my heart. The two of us…”

I can see Flora's lips still moving as she finishes her sentence.

And
now, after a moment's stillness and frowning, she's mouthing my name, urgently.

The thing is, I can't hear her. A soft vibration in my back pocket is growing louder, turning into a buzzing to that fills my ears and – and—

And Flora is gone.

I'm sitting perched alone on a bare, damp ledge of wobbly, rotten planks in the stable block.

There's no clatter and whinny of horses – just the ringing of my phone.

I grab it and am instantly glad of the warm, colourful glow of the screen in this dark, drab place.

And I'm even more glad to see that it's Shaniya calling me back!

This time, this time, I'll tell her everything and she'll listen and be amazed and tell me what I should do and what I should think because my head is upside down and inside out…

“Shaniya!”

“Hey! Sorry about earlier – I couldn't talk 'cause of the girls. You know how it is.”

“That's all right,” I say, with a pang of homesickness spearing my chest.

“So what's happening with you and Weirdwood
Hall,
then? Any more freaky-deakiness I need to know about?”

“Today has been insane,” I blurt out. “You'll never guess what just—”

“
Everything
in your life is insane at the moment, Ellis,” Shaniya interrupts. “So go on; what's happening at the castle with the rock star stepdaddy?”

“What? It's – it's not a castle. It's just a big house. And RJ's not a ‘star', he's just a musician.”

“Yeah, a musician who's rich enough to buy a castle. Ha! And then there's
my
stepdad, the bus driver, who might buy me and my sister a Happy Meal from McDonald's this week if we're lucky…”

Now I'm sort of tripped up in my thinking. It happens sometimes with Shaniya. I'll be sure how I'm going to say something and then along she comes with the joking and I don't know where I am and have to restart my train of thought.

“RJ's daughter arrived here out of the blue this afternoon,” I tell Shaniya, deciding to start with
that
piece of news first, before I hit her with the sledgehammer stuff about Flora.

“Yeah? Did she hear about the castle and want to come claim a wing of it for herself?”

Shaniya
doesn't mean to sound blunt, it's just the way she is. But I wonder if I'm irritating her a bit.

You know, it's my fault if I am; I shouldn't try to explain all this stuff to her, not when she's in the wrong kind of mood. The thing is, Shaniya's great and good fun, but you have to time things right with her or conversations can feel as comfortable as paddling in a pond full of sharks.

“It's pretty bad. She's dropped out of her boarding school and then she ran out on her mum without telling her where she was going.”

“Aw, the poor princess was having a hard time at her expensive boarding school, was she?”

Shaniya is yawning as she speaks.

I don't know whether what I'm saying is boring her or if it's just me in general.

“It's actually been kind of tough around here today,” I try again, “'cause Eloise is either angry or not speaking, and Mum's being weird and I think there are things she's not telling me.”

“What? Things like exactly how rich you all are now?” Shaniya swoops in with one of her boom-
tish
barbed comments.

My head is starting to pound. The thing is, I've
always
been there for Shaniya, but the minute I try to talk to her about anything to do with
me
– my shyness, the awkwardness, riding the waves that roll – she brushes it off with jokes and banter. Jokes and banter that don't
always
come across as very funny or friendly…

“Listen, I know in some ways I seem lucky,” I tell Shaniya now, while remembering how hard it's been for Mum bringing me up on her own all these years, how hard it is having a dad who deserted us, “but it's honestly not that great here.”

I glance around at the wreck of a stable building, and think of the bigger wreck of Wilderwood, and feel suddenly very empty and far away and small inside.

“Aw … it'll be OK, Ellis,” Shaniya drawls. “'Cause maybe RJ can pay to send you to one of those fancy boarding schools too.
And
he could hire you a personal psychotherapist to cure you of the voices in your head. Ha!”

Shaniya's still laughing when I press the end-call button, delete her name and number from my contacts and firmly switch my phone off. That done, I'm suddenly in shock, fingers trembling on the warm plastic. Back down in London, Shaniya
will
be blackly muttering about my usual sense-of-humour failure, I'm betting.

But I can now see what I haven't before: Shaniya's glaring, obvious kindness-failure. When I saw the way that bullying maid treated Flora earlier, I thought how awful it is that someone can have such power over you, that they can make a fool of you and talk to you like you're dirt.

And all this time, that's what's been happening to
me
.

I realize with a stab to the heart that for so long – way too long – I've put up with the
worst
best friend a girl could have. How could I have let that happen? Probably 'cause I didn't have much choice; the other girls we hung around with at school weren't
really
my friends … when I think about it, they barely spoke to me if Shaniya wasn't around.

Dabbing at my streaming eyes with the sleeves of my jumper, I'm swamped with a sense of loneliness – and the realization that there's nothing to go back to London for. With no close family there and no friends to miss, my ties to my home town are properly, totally cut. So hey, it seems that I'm stuck here in Scotland, in weird-and-not-wonderful
Wilderwood
Hall, in the middle of nowhere, with no one.

Well, perhaps there
is
someone. And she's not so very far away, just around the corner in the
other
Wilderwood…

Day Three at Wilderwood Hall and I'm staring at a toilet.

“Ha! How appropriate is that?” Mr Fraser laughs, kneeling on the bathroom floor, pointing at his paint-splattered portable radio with his screwdriver. The track playing is ABBA's “Waterloo”. I smile. It's pretty funny.

“Anyway, the Edwardians were very interested in modernization,” Mr Fraser goes back to telling me as he works at freeing the reluctant nuts and bolts of the old-fashioned loo in the main house's bathroom. Downstairs I can hear his crew clattering and banging away in the not-very-grand reception rooms.

“
All mod cons, they liked, if they could afford it,” he carries on. “So you see, this place's original owner – this Mr Richards with all his money – when he had this house designed he included the bathroom here, AND an indoor toilet in the servants' quarters, which must've seemed like luxury itself to the staff.”

I feel a flutter in my tummy when I think of one member of Mr Richards' staff in particular… From what I've seen so far, Flora didn't exactly enjoy much luxury in her young life. How many coal scuttles did she have to lug up the back stairs every day to the housemaids' closet and beyond? How many fires did she have to build in all those rooms? How many chamber pots – yuck! – was she expected to carry and empty and clean? Actually, that gets me thinking of a question I could ask Mr Fraser.

“Would people in those days still use chamber pots as well as a proper toilet, if they had one?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. I've read a bit about that period, before the First World War,” Mr Fraser chats cheerily, which is kind of surreal considering his face is so close to a loo that's more than a century old. “You can imagine that some of the household would be wary of new inventions, new ways.”

I
wonder if – back in the early 1900s – Mr Richards had pushed for all these newfangled features in the house, while Mrs Richards eyed them with suspicion.

“In fact,” Mr Fraser continues, “plenty of folk actually thought it was completely unhygienic to have a toilet indoors at all! Isn't that amazing to think of?”

“I guess it is,” I mutter, nodding in agreement.

Yes, amazing that some posh lady of the house might consider it unhygienic to have proper plumbing in the house, but would think nothing of her humble housemaid having to deal with other people's wee and poo on a daily basis.

“What about baths like these?” I say, looking at the huge, free-standing roll-top bath with its giant claw feet and chunky taps. “Were they quite a new idea too?”

“Yep,” Mr Fraser answers with a grunt, as the nut he's trying to unscrew resists. “Folk were used to having tin baths in front of the fire. Some thought bathrooms were too draughty to be, you know, naked in. They thought it wasn't best for the health of little children.”