Chill (5 page)

Here the diary entries stopped. Fiona and Samuel lifted their heads and stared at each other.

“What have we found?” he whispered.

“It's her, isn't it?” Fiona hissed. “It has to be.”

A portrait of a lonely young girl had emerged, growing up isolated at Dunadd, and unable to fulfil her true potential. It was a tantalizing glimpse. The two children burned with excitement and frustration. They wanted to know more
of her story, what happened to her afterwards. So many questions jostled inside their heads until they felt they would burst if they didn't find the answers. It was as if she had left behind a trail of clues for them to find; traces of herself.

“Patrick MacFarlane of Lynns Farm,” Fiona breathed. “It's the same name.”

“Where's the rest of the journal?” Samuel said. “There has to be more.”

Fiona shook her head. “This is all there is.”

Leaving the delicate papers inside Samuel's desk for sake keeping, they made their way back to the big house and resolved to finish their job up in the attic.

“It'll be a good excuse,” Samuel said. “We can keep looking for the rest of the journal.”

They clambered back up the narrow ladder to the mouth of the attic, and shone the torch into the darkness. Fiona nudged Samuel and pointed.

“Look at that!” she said.

“What?”

She directed the long finger of light at the trunk underneath the eaves where they'd found the journal. Long curtains of cobwebs hung down from the rafters, and they moved these aside to step closer. There was an air of total neglect about this attic. No one had been up here in years.

“Did you close the lid?” she hissed.

Samuel looked at the trunk. Its lid was now firmly shut. “I don't think so,” he responded.

“Then who did?”

They moved towards the chest, and opened it. Inside, all the embroidered linen which had been spilling from its
belly, and muddled up in their excitement over finding the papers, was neatly folded. So neat, so perfect, it was as if the objects inside had been carefully starched and ironed. As if the children had never touched them, never been there.

“This isn't how we left it,” Fiona murmured, shining the torch into the shadows.

“No.”

“Let's get out of here.”

“Not till we've checked it again,” Samuel insisted. He dipped his hand back into the chest.

“Samuel?” Fiona cried.

He searched frantically, but there was nothing else in there, no crackling of papers to indicate more of what they'd already found. Catherine Morton's journal was incomplete.

“This is useless,” Samuel said.

“We have to go,” Fiona begged him. “I'm not staying up here another minute.”

Reluctantly, they left the attic behind.

“Did you manage to sort out some jumble?” Mrs Morton asked her daughter as they made their way to the kitchen.

“Sort of,” she murmured. “There are a few bin bags full.”

“Well, at least we've made a start. We can take it to the Charity Shop … if we ever get out of here alive,” she added gloomily.

Charles sat in his room that night, in the dark, listening to the sounds of the house. Outside the hills were silent and black. Other people wondered if they found it spooky living on Sheriffmuir. Everyone knew that a battle had been fought here in 1715 and that ghosts were said to haunt the nearby forests, but it wasn’t spooky. Not really. It was their own private wilderness.

In the seclusion of his tower room, Charles took out the letter that he’d found in his father’s desk, and spread it out on his pillow.

It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, but it voiced his father’s concerns and was dated the day he died.

The letter was signed Daniel Morton.

Charles read it through once, twice, then lay on his back in the moonlight, staring up at the ceiling.

Part of him longed to go next door and confide in his brother Seb, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t want to admit that the same thing was happening to him as had happened to his father before him. He knew what his father meant when he wrote that letter. With some deep part of himself, he
understood
.

He also knew that Fiona and Samuel were trying to find out too. By day he watched them like a hawk. He listened at doors, studied them as they walked alone in the gardens
below. How much did they know, he wondered?

The following afternoon when his mother suggested they all go skiing again to lift their spirits, and Fiona backed out of it, claiming she was too tired, Charles watched his sister making her excuses.

As he set off with Sebastian and his mother through the snow, he glanced back at the house uneasily, wondering what the other two would be doing in their absence. He was half-tempted to linger, to double-back and take them by surprise. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. The forest either side of him looked ghostly in the freezing light, mist caught in pockets of darkness where the branches met. He longed to turn back, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it, and he was forced to go on.

He was right, of course. Fiona and Samuel had been waiting for an opportunity to explore the library when the house was empty, and now it had come. Granny and her husband were both occupied in other parts of the house, and Isabel was working in her studio. They knew they wouldn’t be disturbed.

Samuel turned to Fiona once the house had fallen silent. “Right. Now’s our chance.”

They watched from one of the windows to make sure the others had left.

Fiona didn’t feel optimistic about finding the rest of the journal. “Why would those few pages have been torn out? The rest of it must have been destroyed.”

“We don’t know that,” Samuel said.

Fiona led the way into the dark hallway, past the grandfather clock and up the spiralling staircase. She was used to the huge old farmhouse with its turrets and tower and complicated eaves, but even she was beginning to feel a
little nervous creeping around it like a couple of detectives.

In the drawing room the curtains at the big windows were drawn back.

“I love that view,” Samuel murmured, taking a breath as he walked towards it.

“So do I,” Fiona said. They were so high up here that often, when the valley below was filled with mist or rain, they sailed above it all, the sun breaking through. There was a feeling of elation then, as if they really were on top of the world.

“I used to have a great view in Edinburgh too. I could see the Castle from my room, all lit up at night like something out of a fairytale.”

There was a pause and Fiona said, “I wonder if she loved it too.”

“Who?”

“Catherine Morton.”

As they stood at the window, looking at the moor, Samuel tried to make out the rooftops of Lynns Farm below.

“You can’t see it from here,” Fiona told him. “Too many trees.”

“Your mother really worries about you going near that place, doesn’t she?”

Fiona nodded. “It’s another of her weird rules. We’re not allowed to go there, that’s all.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I told you, a grumpy old man lives there.”

“With the same name as Patrick MacFarlane in the journal?”

“I know. Weird, isn’t it? Mum doesn’t get on with him for some reason.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t like our dogs wandering about. Who knows? Anyway, you heard what Charles said. He’s supposed to be a bit of a weirdo.”

“In what way?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. No one actually says!”

They walked steadily across the polished floorboards towards the library. Fiona went first, and pushed it open.

They stepped inside, peering nervously into the shadows.

Everything was exactly as they had seen it before, dust and cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, Fiona’s father’s things laid out carefully on the green leather-topped desk, untouched, just as if he was about to reappear and take up his place again, doing whatever it was he was doing the day he died. It seemed to Samuel there was a heavy atmosphere in this room, some kind of tension or energy.

“Now what?” Fiona whispered.

He caught her eye. “We start looking, that’s what!”

Their voices sounded loud in the silence, and they glanced nervously over their shoulders.

Fiona pulled a crimson velvet footstool towards her, and sat down. Samuel was too intrigued to sit. He touched the spine of an old book with faded gold lettering embossed on its leather cover. “She said in the diary that it was a leather-bound volume,” he murmured. “We need to check every book on these shelves until we’re sure it isn’t here.”

They decided to take a wall each, and work through the books methodically.

“I don’t trust Charles,” Fiona whispered after a while, listening out for any sound in the corridor beyond. “He knows we’re up to something.”

“What if he comes back unexpectedly?” she added.

“We’ll worry about that if it happens,” Samuel said. To begin with they were quite hopeful. There were so many old volumes here, and every one that they slid from its place on the dusty shelves seemed like a distinct possibility. However, each time they inspected a book, they replaced it, disappointed. Catherine’s journal was proving very elusive.

“This is going to take hours,” Fiona sighed, gazing up at the ranks of books towering above her.

Samuel knew that too, but was trying not to despair. He didn’t want to give in so easily. What had seemed such a good idea when they started out was turning into a mammoth task. He’d been so certain they’d find something. It was too painful to give up now.

“We’ll just have to come back when we can, and keep looking,” he murmured.

“How can we do that? The house is never empty like this. Not with all of us snowed in together, driving each other batty.”

“We can come back at night, when everyone’s asleep.”

Fiona couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“You are joking, aren’t you?”

But she could tell from the look on his face that he meant it. He was deadly serious.

“You’re mad,” she whispered. “Think of the risk!”

He shrugged and avoided her eye. “It’s worth it.” He bent his head and continued to search, slipping book after book from the shelf. One by one he looked at them, blowing the dust off their covers, then slid them back into place. It was clear these books hadn’t been touched in years.

“Granny Hughes doesn’t like dusting in here on her own
when she knows the rest of the house is empty, so the library doesn’t always get cleaned,” Fiona pointed out. “She has a thing about the library, she won’t go near it unless she has to.”

“Everyone seems to have a thing about the library.”

They searched on in silence. The hours passed and it didn’t look as if they would ever find the rest of Catherine Morton’s journal amongst the neglected books of her father’s old library. They would never find out what happened to her and Patrick.

“Her diary is nearly three hundred years old, after all,” Fiona said. “Why would it be sitting in the library, waiting for us to find it? It’s much more likely to have been destroyed or lost.”

“Then why did someone tear out the opening pages and keep them?”

“Who knows?”

As they were preparing to give up, Samuel leant against the bookcase and his gaze travelled upwards. His eye came to rest on a dark carved wooden box on top of a glass-fronted bookcase. It rang a bell for some reason, although he didn’t know why. It looked very old and covered in cobwebs. “I wonder what’s in there?” he murmured.

She followed his gaze. “I don’t know.” There were so many old things lying around the place that had been there for centuries that nothing stood out as far as Fiona was concerned. But she stopped suddenly in mid-sentence. They both heard it – a sound just outside the door, the light tread of footsteps crossing the drawing room towards them. Fiona put a finger to her lips. “Shh!” she hissed. “Listen.”

They sat perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe, as the footsteps came nearer.

Suddenly Samuel let out a gasp. “She mentioned it!”

“What? Sssh? Be quiet!”

But Samuel wouldn’t be silenced, in spite of whatever or whoever was waiting for them outside the door.

“She mentioned it in her journal. It’s the ebony box – it’s black like piano keys!” and he pointed up at the dusty old box sitting on the very top of the highest bookcase.

They stared at each other, speechless. Then the slow pacing stopped, and there was a terrible moment of suspense when Samuel and Fiona felt sure the intruder would open the door to the library and find them there. They kept very still, waiting for the door to open. At last, without warning, the footsteps began to recede.

They both let out a sigh.

“It was probably just Granny,” Fiona whispered.

“It didn’t sound much like her.”

Samuel rose unsteadily to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Fiona cried, in a hoarse whisper.

“To see who it is.”

“You can’t.”

But Samuel wasn’t listening. “I’ll be all right,” he hissed, and crept towards the door. He opened it a fraction, his heart stopping. He felt sure it was just someone trying to scare them, Charles perhaps. He pushed the door gently. It swung open on its hinges with an eerie whine, and the huge drawing room lay empty before him.

There was no one else about.

He walked slowly across the length of the room towards the door at the far end, tiptoeing quietly. Just as he reached the door, it suddenly swung open in his face and he let out a short cry. There was a loud scream, and it was a moment
or two before he realized that his own mother was standing before him, her face white with shock.

“Samuel, you scared the life out of me,” she gasped. “What on earth are you doing creeping about like this?”

Fiona appeared behind him looking sheepish. “We were just looking for a book I’d lost.”

Isabel Cunningham held a hand to her pounding heart and leant against the door-frame. “I’ve just been giving myself the creeps, stalking about the empty house like this. I was worried about you. Wondered where you’d got to.”

“Sorry, Mum,” Samuel said, and tried very hard not to snigger.

Downstairs in the kitchen Isabel put the kettle on the Aga for some tea. “I promised your mother I’d let the dogs out and keep an eye on you,” she said.

“I don’t need looking after. I can look after myself,” Fiona retorted.

“Even so, young lady, when we’ve had some tea, you two can take the dogs out for some exercise.”

“What are you going to do?” Samuel asked his mother.

“I’ve got work to do,” Isabel replied shortly. And he knew that meant her sculpture. She would be busy with it all afternoon, until the cold drove her from her workshop.

As they drank their tea Samuel thought of the ebony box lying in the library, almost inaccessible. He was desperate to inspect it, but Fiona warned him that her mother and the boys would be back at any time. “We don’t have time,” she said. “If she catches us …” And he knew she was right.

They retreated to Samuel’s room in the cottage instead, and carefully unearthed the remains of the journal from his desk.

He scanned the fragile papers and found the paragraph he was looking for. They read it out loud.