HartsLove (6 page)

Only he did not. Actually, Charles felt an extraordinary desire to laugh. It should not have come to this. Of course it should not. But it had, and brandy made everything very easy. Grab the cheque and it was done. He was going to exchange Hartslove Castle for a bit of paper. It really was quite funny when you thought about it. He stretched out his hand, but as his fingers brushed the cheque, the air was shattered by a scream so blood-curdling that Gryffed's every hair stood straight up on end. Daisy clutched her father. Lily clutched Rose. Clover and Columbine clutched each
other. The buyer clutched his wife and children. The cheque fluttered to the floor.

The scream came from outside, and Charles, dragging Daisy, was first out of the front door, closely followed by Rose and Lily and Clover and Columbine, still attached to each other. The buyer and his family brought up the rear.

The first thing they saw was Mrs Snipper, one hand over her mouth and the other braced, palm outwards, as though waiting to catch something. They squinted up, as she was doing, and through the mist they could just see the top of the battlements. First there was nothing except stone, then there was Garth, now visible, now not, performing slow backflips, his feet only just catching the narrow merlons sticking up between the gaps in the castellation. Mrs Snipper was beside herself. ‘Do something, Sir Charles. For God's sake. Master Garth'll kill himself.' She wrung her hands. Charles opened his mouth.

‘No,' Rose said quickly. ‘If you shout, you'll distract him. He'll fall.'

Charles's lips snapped shut. Over and over went Garth, his white shirt billowing, so that there looked to be no boy inside it at all. Charles ran back inside, heading for the tower staircase.

Daisy glanced at the visitors. Both girls were whimpering. She was frightened for Garth but it struck her, in a brainwave, that this was an opportunity. She hobbled over. ‘I'm so sorry,' she said. ‘The Spirits don't usually appear
during the day. Perhaps your father's upset them by not offering enough money.'

‘What?' blustered the father. He had no idea of Garth's existence so was not sure what he was seeing.

‘The Spirits,' Daisy explained, employing her most practical smile. ‘They come with the castle, I'm afraid.'

‘Spirits? Don't be ridiculous,' the man declared. But he could not take his eyes off the whirling white cog high above him.

‘Please don't worry,' Daisy said. ‘The Spirits are quite harmless.' She paused. ‘Mostly.'

The mother had begun to shake her head and shove her girls towards the carriage. The horses were already straining to be away. ‘Let's go, Wilbur,' the woman said. ‘There's plenty of other places. I don't know why you ever wanted this one. It's giving me the creeps.'

The man resisted. His wife was adamant. They were still arguing as the carriage jolted off rather faster than the coachman intended.

Daisy forgot about them instantly. In the unearthly light Garth was like a bouncing star, except he began to miss his handholds. Nothing could stop Mrs Snipper calling to him. ‘Come down, Master Garth,' she implored. ‘Come down!'

But Garth kept on flipping, over and over, round the crumbling battlements, behind the keep, down the south-east wing and back. He was in a world of his own; a world of spinning and arching, where death and life were all the
same because he was not just a de Granville, he was all the de Granvilles there had ever been, and he was standing with them against the enemy who these days might come in carriages with wives and daughters, but whose chequebooks were as dangerous as Saracens' swords. And there were other enemies. Garth named them as he flipped: drink – the thief who had stolen his father away; false hope in the shape of that horse; anger and sadness, both of which were eating him up. He thrust his body over and over. He would never stop flipping. Flipping was the only thing he had left. His feet slipped. The drop yawned. He did not care.

He heard his name shouted. Charles had made it on to the roof and was holding out his arms. ‘Garth! Garth!'

Garth jerked, was almost lost. His father caught him and yanked him on to the flat of the roof, but Garth slipped through and flipped on, all the way down the south-east wing again. Only his concentration was broken. Now he was aware of the upgust of wind rattling through his shirt. His left hand missed the merlon completely. He was flipping on air – he was falling. For the first time, a tingle of fear. He did care. And here his father was again, again holding out his hands, those same sweet, kind, treacherous hands that held his children close even as they handed over money and opened bottles. Garth could not help himself. He clutched at them. Charles pulled him close and for a moment father and son were locked in a desperate embrace. Then Garth felt the smooth neck of the brandy bottle in his
father's pocket. His fear turned back to anger, his anger to despair. He thrust away, leaving Charles once again with empty arms. ‘Garth!' Charles cried. ‘Garth.' Garth shook his head and ran to the edge of the ruins. Here he stopped and stood tall, his shirt draped like an angel's gown. He opened his arms and the sleeves were like wings. He was Hartslove; Hartslove was him. At the Resting Place, the gravestones shimmered. In the stables, The One stirred. In the wood, Snipe paused. Without a sound, Garth thrust upwards, arched, and plummeted into the dark.

Everybody was screaming now, everybody except Daisy, who swung across the courtyard and lurched on to the drawbridge, gripping her crutches so tightly her knuckles cracked. ‘Don't take him,' she begged the castle. ‘Please don't take him.' She held her breath, willing herself to see Garth tumbling over and landing in the soft sludge of the moat, willing herself to see him clambering out. ‘Now,' she willed. ‘Now, he'll appear now. Help him, Hartslove. Help him.'

A moment more, then she saw him. He was no longer an angel. He was a dirty, wet boy clambering up the banking and setting sail across the field towards the river. She watched him until she heard somebody running up behind her. She turned. Charles had rushed down from the roof. ‘Oh sweet Jesus,' she heard him repeating. ‘OhsweetJesusno.' When he reached Daisy, his legs buckled and he sagged against her. ‘It's all right, Pa,' Daisy said, holding him tight. ‘Garth's all
right.' She held her father until his legs gathered strength, then helped him back across the drawbridge. ‘Garth's safe,' she told the others. ‘We've seen him.'

‘Lord Love Us.' Mrs Snipper was still wringing her hands. Lily had fainted.

‘I don't think the Lord had much to do with it,' Daisy said. ‘Help Rose with Lily, Mrs Snips. I can manage Pa.'

Daisy left her father in the library and returned to the drawing room. It was impossible to believe that scarcely half an hour had passed since the intruders had arrived. The cheque was still lying on the floor. Daisy burned it whilst the others laid Lily on a sofa and sprinkled her with water. When Lily began to come round, Rose wiped her hands and tried to be practical. ‘We must start packing,' she said, looking rather hopelessly around the room. ‘Do you suppose people who buy castles buy the furniture and the tapestries? How do you take down curtains? Are they sewn on to the rails?'

Daisy turned from the fire. ‘What do you mean, packing?'

‘Don't be silly, Daisy. You know just what I mean,' Rose said in a tired voice. ‘We can't stop people coming, and if Mrs Snips hadn't screamed, we'd be sold already.'

‘Don't you see?'

‘See what? For goodness sake, Daisy. See what?'

‘That we don't have to go.'

‘Oh, please. We've got to go, and that's that.'

‘You mean you want Hartslove to be sold?'

‘Don't be unfair,' cried Rose. ‘Of course I don't! But living here costs money, and we don't have any.' Daisy blinked. ‘And besides,' Rose carried on, recklessly allowing her worst fears to tumble out, ‘we can't carry on living all bound up with stones and cobwebs and the Dead Girl and the tombstones at the Resting Place. Next year I'll be eighteen. Eighteen! Don't you understand, Daisy? Don't any of you?' She could not stop now. ‘I want to have a proper life, an ordinary life, and how can I – how can any of us – have an ordinary life when nothing here is ordinary? How can we actually have any life of our own at all?' She could see the shock on her sisters' faces but she did not care. She could not, just
could not
, spend her whole life in a place so full of the past there was no space for anything else.

Daisy gulped. ‘It needn't be like that, Rose. You can have a life. We all can.'

‘How?' Rose asked, all her energy draining away. ‘How, exactly, Daisy, unless we leave here.'

‘Through The One.'

‘Oh, Daisy!' Rose slumped on to the sofa next to Lily and buried her face in her hands. Lily was sitting up. ‘Don't upset Rose any more,' she begged.

‘There's no need to be upset. Don't you see?' Daisy said earnestly. ‘The One's going to win the Derby. I absolutely believe it. And when he wins, everything'll be different.'

‘Different?' Rose did not bother to raise her head. ‘How different? Whatever The One does, Pa will still drink; the candles will still go out; the Dead Girl will still haunt Pa's passage; Ma still won't come back.'
And Arthur Rose will still marry somebody else
, she thought, though she did manage to stop herself saying this out loud.

Daisy shook her head. ‘No, Rose. It won't be like that.'

‘How will it be, then?' Rose could not fight any more.

‘I don't know,' Daisy said. ‘But it will be good for all of us, each in our own way. I just know it.'

Rose closed her eyes. ‘Even if you're right,' she said, ‘even in the hugely improbable likelihood that you are right, just tell me this: why on earth should this The One be different from any of the others?'

Daisy held her ground. ‘I've never believed in any of the others,' she said.

Rose pulled herself together. Daisy must be made to face the truth. She opened her eyes and addressed her sister very slowly. ‘But Pa has, Daisy. He's believed every single one. And you know as well as I do that even he doesn't believe in this one. Why else would he have been going to take that cheque?' She blew her nose on the handkerchief Arthur Rose had given her at the bird's funeral. It was the end, and they had better get used to it. She got up, smoothed her skirt and made for the door.

Daisy got there before her. She would not let Rose leave the room. ‘Pa's so full of brandy he doesn't know what
he believes,' she said. ‘Please listen, Rose. Please. Today Hartslove helped us. When I told those people Garth was a ghost, they believed me because of the mist. If we can do that once, we can do it again.'

‘It was just luck that Garth looked like a ghost,' Rose said, her impatience, never far beneath the surface, resurgent again. ‘If it'd been spring, with the sun shining, he wouldn't have looked like a ghost at all and the cheque would already be in the bank.'

‘It wasn't luck,' Daisy said, doggedly determined. ‘It was a stopgap.'

‘A what?' asked Clover and Columbine.

‘A stopgap.'

‘Is that a special type of ghost?'

‘No,' said Daisy. ‘A stopgap's something that holds things together until they can be properly fixed.'

‘And when exactly will everything be properly fixed?' asked Rose. She tried not sound sarcastic, but it was hard.

‘In one hundred and forty-eight days,' Daisy said.

‘One hundred and forty-eight days?'

‘That's how long it is until The One's Derby.'

A long pause followed this announcement. Rose did not know what to say. Eventually Clover, or perhaps Columbine, broke in. ‘One hundred and forty-eight days is forever. If we've no money, we'll never survive that long. We shall starve. We shall freeze. We shall die.' There had been an article about such a family in the copy of the
Guardian
they were currently digesting. Clover and Columbine began to imagine their own obituaries.

‘Be quiet!' Rose barked. She looked at Daisy. ‘You've actually worked it out? To the day?' she asked, almost incredulous.

‘It's one hundred and forty-eight days to the race, including the day of the Derby itself. I looked it up in Pa's racing book,' Daisy explained. Nobody contradicted her, so she continued. ‘I'm thinking, you see, that though we can't stop people coming to look round, we could put them off, just as happened today. I mean, one hundred and forty-eight days isn't that many, really, and some days nobody will come at all. Obviously we can't rely on mist, and we don't want Garth to . . . to . . .' she swallowed. ‘What I mean is that we could do our own hauntings, inside.'

Clover and Columbine were agog. ‘We could dress up as dead de Granvilles, you mean?'

‘That kind of thing,' said Daisy.

‘Stopgap ghosts!' The twins' eyes sparkled. ‘It would be fun. Perhaps one of the visitors will have a heart attack and die and we could write their death notice and get published.' The prospect was glorious.

Daisy ignored this. ‘What do you think, Rose?' she asked tentatively. Rose's support was crucial. ‘The One will win, Rose, he will.'

Rose hit her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘For
the love of God, Daisy! Just stop it with that when I'm trying to think what Ma would do!'

‘That's easy, Rose,' said Lily, in an intervention none of them expected. In the firelight, her face, even paler than usual, shone. ‘Ma would do nothing. She'd just drift, like the Dead Girl.' She smiled a wan smile. ‘Ma's a ghost here already.'

The fire crackled and the door handle twisted. A sudden draught blew the door open. They all jumped. Nobody came in. Then they heard the rattle of teacups on a tray. ‘Mrs Snips,' said Rose faintly.