Northanger Abbey

22

Cat had hoped for an afternoon in the company of both Tilneys; as much as she enjoyed Ellie’s company, it was Henry who brought out the sparkle in her. But he barely stayed with them a quarter of an hour, dragging himself away with apparent reluctance to prepare a briefing paper. ‘Do you have to do it today?’ Ellie asked. ‘When Cat’s just got here?’

Henry spread his hands. ‘What can I do? It’s for my devilmaster.’

His response startled and alarmed Cat, and both Tilneys burst out laughing at her expression. ‘If you could see your face,’ Ellie giggled.

‘It’s a Scottish legal term,’ Henry said. ‘Technically, I’m a devil. That’s what they call a trainee advocate. In a couple of months, hopefully my devilmaster will decide I’m fit for purpose and he’ll recommend to the principal devilmaster that I should be admitted to the Faculty of Advocates. But till then, I spend my days devilling.’

‘What a bizarre name for it. My brother is a pupil barrister in Newcastle, he’s never claimed to be a devil!’

‘That’s because he’s not.’ Henry put the guitar down and stood up. ‘It’s one of those things that marks the difference between Scottish and English law. But perhaps your father would have put the blocks on you coming to visit a house with a resident devil?’

‘I don’t know if he believes in that kind of devil,’ Cat said uneasily.

‘What? He doesn’t do exorcisms?’

‘No, he’s just an ordinary vicar.’

‘Perhaps it’s about time he started, if you’re going to be hanging out with the devilish Tilneys.’ It was Henry’s parting shot as he left the room.

Left to their own devices, Cat and Ellie had no problem entertaining themselves. They put on a music DVD then talked their way through it, slumped on the sofa together. Who knows what they discussed; only that it was of no consequence to anyone but themselves. But at last, Ellie told an anecdote about a family holiday that featured her mother. And Cat found the courage to ask her about matters of more weight. ‘How old were you when your mother died?’

Ellie shifted away from her. ‘Thirteen,’ she said.

‘That sucks,’ Cat said. ‘I don’t know how I’d have got through the last four years without my mum. I mean, sometimes she drives me completely tonto, but mostly she’s like a great big security blanket.’

‘That’s a great way of describing it,’ Ellie said. ‘And when you lose that, it’s like falling through space with no bottom.’

‘Was it sudden, when she died? Or did you have time to get used to the idea? Not that I suppose you can ever get used to an idea like that.’

Ellie shook her head. ‘She kept saying she felt tired, so eventually Father took her off to some specialist in Edinburgh for tests. It was in the Christmas holidays.’ She gave a sad little noise that might have been an attempt at a laugh. ‘He wasn’t very sympathetic. He thought the doctor would just tell her to pull herself together. When they came home, they both looked shell-shocked. They just said there was something wrong with her blood then shut themselves away in Father’s study. Henry and I were terrified.’

‘Anyone would have been. But, something wrong with her blood? What was it? Did you find out?’

Ellie gave a heartfelt sigh. ‘Mother told us later that night. She had a rare form of leukaemia. It’s got a long complicated name so they just call it T-PLL. It’s very aggressive. She told us the chances were that she only had a few months to live.’

‘Was there no treatment?’ Cat couldn’t imagine what it must be like to hear such news. She didn’t think she could bear it if it happened to her mother.

‘She didn’t want to do the chemo. She said it wasn’t going to save her from dying and she wanted to make the most of the time she had with us.’ Ellie’s mouth twisted in a bitter grimace. ‘It turned out there wasn’t much of that. She was dead inside two months.’

Impulsively, Cat put her arm round Ellie’s shoulders and pulled her friend close. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she said. But she couldn’t help a tiny niggling voice in the back of her head muttering about bad blood and vampires.

‘It all happened so fast,’ Ellie said. ‘And Father just cut himself off from all of us. Freddie’s useless when it comes to emotions, so that left me and Henry to cope on our own. I suppose that’s why we’re so close now.’

They said nothing for a time while the music DVD continued, irrelevantly upbeat about love and heartbreak. The mood was broken by a knock at the door and a short red-faced woman bustled in without pausing for an invitation. ‘I thought I’d better remind you dinner’s early tonight,’ she said. ‘You know how your father hates to be kept waiting.’ Her accent was so broad Cat felt herself translating into English in her head.

Ellie sprang up like a guilty thing surprised. ‘Mrs C! This is my friend Catherine Morland.’ She turned to Cat. ‘This is Mrs Calman. Calman’s wife. Obviously. She runs the house for us. We’d be lost without her.’

‘Everybody calls me Cat.’ She wasn’t sure of the etiquette. Should she shake hands or not?

Mrs Calman surveyed her from head to toe with small dark eyes like currants in a scarlet bun. ‘Welcome to Northanger Abbey, Miss Morland. I hope you enjoy your stay with us. If you need anything at all, just see me.’ It sounded more like a threat than an offer.

‘Thank you.’ Cat gave an uncertain smile. ‘This is an amazing house.’

‘Aye,’ Mrs Calman said. ‘If these walls could talk ...’ She turned to Ellie. ‘Don’t forget now, Eleanor. I’ll be putting the soup on the table in half an hour. Whether you’re there or not.’ She nodded at them both and left, closing the door firmly behind her.

‘Wow. She’s a bit of a dragon,’ Cat said.

‘She used to be in the army. That’s how she met Calman. I think they both think that working for Father is as close as it gets to still being in uniform.’

‘If it was a novel, she’d have been the one who clasped you to her bosom after your mother died and revealed her previously unsuspected heart of gold.’

Ellie snorted. ‘Trust me, my life is definitely not a novel. We’d better get ready for dinner. I’ll meet you at the top of the stairs in twenty minutes.’

Cat looked at her jeans and T-shirt. ‘Should I get changed?’

Ellie gave her a critical once-over. ‘Jeans are OK, but I’d lose the T-shirt. Father likes to pretend the last hundred years never happened.’

They parted in the hallway and Cat hurried back to her room. She decided to ditch both the jeans and the T-shirt in favour of a long floaty skirt layered in different shades of green and blue, topped with a plain white cambric blouse. If the General wanted to live in the past, she’d do her best to be a demure young woman. She looked longingly at the japanned chest, but told herself to be patient, to wait till the house had settled down for the night. Just as well she had, for only moments later, Ellie knocked on her door, impatient for her company.

Although Cat and Ellie arrived in the drawing room a full five minutes ahead of the deadline, pink and panting from running down the corridor and stairs, the General was staring ostentatiously at the elegant grandmother clock in the corner. Henry was already there, done with devilling, sipping at what Cat fervently hoped was a Bloody Mary. ‘Just in time,’ the General said. Cat thought she heard a tinge of disappointment in his voice and scolded herself for the unworthy thought.

As Mrs Calman served the soup, Cat drank in the details of the grand room. Everything gleamed and glittered with polished wood, silver and crystal. The table was easily big enough to seat a dozen or more, but it came nowhere near filling the space. Seeing her scrutiny, the General said, ‘You must be used to far grander dinners than this with your benefactors, the Allens?’

Surprised, Cat shook her head. ‘No, not at all. The Allens don’t do much formal entertaining down in Dorset. We generally go round for kitchen suppers.’

He nodded sagely. ‘I suppose there’s not much of a choice of guests down in that part of the country. Not like here in the Borders. It will be different with the Allens in London, I’d lay money on that. I’m sure that Mr Allen knows exactly what he’s doing when it comes to impressing people with his success.’

Perplexed, Cat wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. She knew Mr Allen had to impress people with his instinct for theatrical successes, but she didn’t think he did it with ostentatious displays of wealth.

‘He’s certainly very successful,’ Henry said, seeing her uncertainty. ‘But not everyone feels the need to display their achievements materially.’

The General raised his eyebrows in disbelief, his face growing pale with annoyance. ‘Then how are people to know where you have reached in the hierarchy of things? Sometimes, Henry, you sound almost like a socialist.’ He said the word as if it were the worst insult he could hurl across a dining table with ladies present.

‘I think people should live in the style that suits them best, so long as they can afford it,’ Cat said. ‘Not everyone has the good fortune to be able to live somewhere as wonderful as Northanger Abbey.’

Mollified, the General grunted and finished his soup. When he was so brusque, Cat couldn’t help but think wistfully of the kindness and conviviality of the Allens. But when he left the young people to their own devices, Cat was as happy as she’d ever been. Thinking of the Allens reminded her that she had been unable to communicate with any of her nearest and dearest for almost a whole day.

‘General Tilney?’ She spoke with some diffidence as Mrs Calman cleared away the soup dishes and placed a selection of curries and side dishes in the middle of the table. ‘I wonder whether it might be possible for me to use your wifi?’ She caught the look of alarm shared by Henry and Ellie.

‘The wifi?’ The General frowned. ‘Is that entirely necessary?’

‘I wanted to check my email.’

‘My dear girl, why? Your parents and the Allens know precisely where you are and have the telephone number, so if there were any urgent need to contact you, there would be no difficulty.’ He spooned rice on to his plate and added some lamb methi. ‘You don’t have any kind of job yet, so there can be no urgent business communication awaiting you. In short, Catherine, there’s no conceivable reason other than the purely frivolous for you to “check your email”. Isn’t that so?’

Cat was taken aback. Never before had an adult lectured her thus nor attempted to keep her from the constant to and fro of social media. ‘I suppose,’ she said.

‘So there is no need for me to make myself vulnerable to the phreaks and hackers out there who are just waiting for the chance to read my secure emails and plunder our bank accounts. There is no reason why you should be aware of this, but I receive communications that could conceivably be useful to the enemies of our country. We use the wifi sparingly here. I choose not to take risks with my security or the security of the nation.’ It was a virtuoso display of pomposity and self-importance thinly disguised by the General’s tone of regret.

Chastened, Cat devoted herself to Mrs Calman’s curries, which were spicy enough to take her mind off any grievance against the General. Before dessert was served, he left the table, saying, ‘I have an MOD briefing to take a look at. Enjoy the rest of your meal. I’ll see you in the morning.’

When he left the room, Henry said, ‘He still does consultancy work for the army. He’s very cautious about security.’

‘Paranoid, more like,’ Ellie muttered.

After dinner, the trio retired upstairs to their sitting room and played a supremely silly game on one of the consoles, laughing and mocking each other’s efforts. The evening slipped by in an entertaining blur, and Cat couldn’t help thinking how well Henry and Ellie would fit in with the Morlands. Provided, of course, that she was mistaken about the whole vampire thing. Perhaps she’d discover more clues to help her make her mind up when she explored the mysterious japanned chest in her room.

By the time they separated and went to bed, the night was stormy. The wind had been rising at intervals the entire afternoon, though Cat had failed to notice it. Now it howled in dramatic gusts, bringing noisy scatters of rain with it. It was awesome, Cat thought as she made her way down the long corridor to her room. She nearly jumped out of her skin when a particularly loud gust was followed by the distant slam of a door. It was impossible to escape the sensation of having been dropped into an episode of the Hebridean Harpies’ adventures. Northanger Nixies, perhaps, given how much water was pouring down her windows when she finally reached her room.

Cat pulled the curtains closed but they didn’t stop moving when she stepped away from them. ‘It’s the wind,’ she said firmly. ‘Just the wind.’ To make doubly sure, she pulled each curtain swiftly back and checked the window seat. Then she put her hand up to the window and felt the damp draught where the ancient frames had warped enough to let the night in. ‘It’s the wind, you moron,’ she said to herself, letting the curtains fall.

She eyed the chest, but, recognising the deliciousness of deferred pleasure, she decided to get ready for bed first. Then, with clean teeth and freshly laundered pyjamas, she approached the lustrous black chest. Cat gripped the edge of the lid and attempted to lift it. She was surprised by how cold and heavy it was until she realised it was made not from wood but from metal. She changed her grip and put more effort into it and this time she was rewarded with success. The lid rose and she rested it against the wall, careful not to make a sound. Not that it would have made any difference if she had, for by now the night’s peace was regularly broken by rumbles and claps of thunder as the storm took hold.

To Cat’s disappointment, what was revealed was nothing more exotic than a hand-pieced quilt. It was true that the fabrics were of rich, jewelled colours, the pattern mathematically precise and intriguing and the stitches tiny and neat. But still, it was only a quilt. Cat drew it out of the chest and shook it out. It was big enough to act as a spread for a single bed. A hand-written label in one corner caught her eye and she pulled it close. ‘Margaret Tilney fecit 2001,’ she read. Cat, who had learned a little Latin from the memorial tablets in her father’s churches, thought ‘fecit’ meant ‘did’, which made a sort of sense. Margaret Tilney did it in 2001. She remembered Ellie that afternoon referring to her mother’s quilting. This must be one of her quilts. She was holding in her hands the very fabrics that the General’s dead wife had held. Her DNA was mingling with Henry’s mother’s even as she had the thought. Cat didn’t know whether to be spooked or gratified.

She spread the quilt out on her bed then returned to her chest. She was surprised to see that the quilt was not the top item in a pile of bedding. Instead, it had sat in its own shallow drawer. She studied the chest again and realised it should now be possible to open the double doors at the front. She tugged at them, but they remained puzzlingly closed. She ran her hand along the inside of the drawer and her finger snagged on a metal hook almost flush with the wood.

Trepidatiously, Cat pushed the hook free of its fastening and at once the doors swung back, emitting the sort of creak that presages something blood-curdling in every vampire DVD she’d ever seen. Cat let out a little scream, but all that was revealed was a stack of six narrow drawers similar to the ones she’d seen in drapers’ shops in TV period dramas. She drew in her breath and pulled open the drawer below the quilt shelf.

Eight white cotton pillowcases and a lavender bag. Cat breathed again.

The drawers below held, variously, a pair of sheets, four cross-stitched cushion covers, three embroidered dressing-table runners, half a dozen silk scarves and a rusty red-brown stain that sent Cat’s heart into her throat.

The stain was on the bottom of the last drawer, about the size and shape of a blade. The sort of stain you’d expect if someone had laid a bloody knife there. She made a small mewing sound in the back of her throat and recoiled from the chest.

And yet, the streak of curiosity that ran through Cat as strongly as her blood itself could not keep from examining the piece of furniture. As her eye calibrated the dimension, she realised there was a gap beneath the bottom drawer of perhaps five or six centimetres. Could the answer to the bloodstain – for so she had already classified it without a waver of doubt – lie in the space beneath?

Cat clenched her fists as if this would strengthen her resolve, then started to jiggle the drawer out of its runners. It was stiff and unwieldy towards the end, but she persisted, and almost fell backwards on to the floor when the drawer was finally released.

The cavity that was revealed was difficult to examine because, unlike a drawer that could be pulled out, it was not easily accessible. By angling her head to one side, Cat could see there was a dark oblong at the back of the space, about the size of a book or a DVD box set. She tried to squeeze her hand into the gap, but she couldn’t insinuate her arm far enough to reach whatever it was.

She stood up and fetched a hanger from the wardrobe then got down on the floor by the bottom of the chest. Using the hanger as a hook, she dragged the object towards her. When she realised it was indeed a book, her first sensation was one of disappointment. Still, she wasn’t about to give up her quest until her curiosity was satisfied. She reached for the volume. Her fingers told her it was flexible, bound in soft leather, with thin pages.

Cat drew the book from its hiding place and stared at it, open-mouthed with astonishment. That it was a copy of the Bible was not in itself remarkable. What was remarkable, however, was what appeared to be a bullet hole in the top right-hand quadrant, a bullet hole that went right through to the back cover.

Before she could open the book, there was a clap of thunder so loud and so close that Cat cried out in terror. The room was abruptly plunged into darkness and a second deafening thunderclap vibrated through the air. Cat curled into a ball and moaned softly. What terrible powers had her discovery unleashed?