Mesmerized (17 page)

“What, dear?” Lady St. Leger looked up.

Madame Valenskaya blinked, glancing around the room, and Olivia replaced her cup in her saucer, listening.

“That funny little sound. Almost like a kitten mewling.”

“Or a person crying,” Olivia countered. She leaned forward, and the noise became a little louder.

“Oh, dear.” Lady St. Leger looked concerned. “Someone crying? But who? Where?” She turned to look around the room, frowning. “Perhaps it is one of the maids in the hall.”

Olivia put down her saucer on the table and got up to go to the doors into the hall. She looked up and down the hallway, seeing no one, and came back inside, shaking her head. “There is no one there. And I cannot hear it in the hall.”

The crying was definitely louder now. The four women were hushed, listening.

“It sounds like a child! But where is she?” Lady St. Leger said, frowning. “It sounds as if—as if she is
here.
”

The sobbing continued, hanging eerily on the air, disembodied and forlorn. Madame Valenskaya’s voice sounded in the hush, a low, sad whisper. “A lonely soul. She is lost…lost.”

Lady St. Leger gave a visible shiver, her face turning even paler. “It is a spirit?”

The Russian woman nodded solemnly. “The dead mourn.”

Olivia ignored the goose bumps that arose on her arms at the woman’s words. “Nonsense,” she said stoutly. “It is a person crying right here and now.”

She walked around the room and quickly realized that as she moved away from the group the noise became quieter and as she returned, it grew stronger. She stepped past the tea table and Belinda. The sound was loudest here, by the fireplace.

“The fireplace!” she cried suddenly. “It must be coming through the fireplace.”

She whirled and ran from the room.

O
livia paused outside in the hall, casting a glance at the stairs in one direction, which led down in grand sweeping fashion, then at the less grand staircase at the other end of the hall, leading up. Belinda came hurrying out of the room after her, and Olivia swung toward her.

“What’s above the sitting room?”

Belinda hesitated, thinking, then said, “The nursery, I think.”

“And below?”

“The small ballroom.”

“Up,” Olivia decided. On instinct, it seemed more likely to her that someone would use the unoccupied nursery to perpetrate their fraud than a large, open public room where a servant might walk by at any moment.

She took off down the hall and up the stairs, lifting her skirts to run better. Belinda stayed on her heels. They reached the nursery and looked in. There was
no one in the large, central schoolroom. Olivia went inside and peered into each of the small bedrooms that opened off it, with Belinda trailing after her. She came back into the central room, frowning. At that moment the weeping sound came again, faint but distinct. Olivia darted into the hall. The sound, she thought, came from the other end of the hall.

She moved lightly and quickly. The sound was becoming louder. Then it stopped, and Olivia broke into a run. The hall was long and narrow and low-ceilinged, with doors opening off either side. It was here that the servants slept, and during the day there was no one up here. Olivia and Belinda’s footsteps echoed hollowly on the wood floor. There was no muffling carpet runner here.

Tucked away under the eaves of the house, there were no windows except one at the end of the hall, so it was much darker than it had been on the floors below. The sound came again, a mournful weeping, echoing through the silent gloomy hall. Olivia’s skin prickled. Belinda shot her an anxious glance, but she stayed with her as Olivia pressed onward, following the distant crying.

The top floor was a warren of rooms and hallways, and they twisted and turned through the cramped corridors. At one point they reached a closed door at the end of the hall, and they hesitated. Then the weeping came faintly from behind the door, and Olivia pulled it open. It led into yet another hall.

“We must be in the old wing of the house,” Be
linda whispered, intimidated by the profound hush of the corridor in front of them. “Well, it’s not actually older, of course. The main wing is the oldest, really, but when they renovated years ago, they only did the main wing. This part of the house is closed off and never used.”

Olivia started down the dim hallway, lifting her skirts to avoid the dust on the floors. Belinda stuck to her side like glue. The sobbing came yet again, seemingly from another narrow staircase, and they followed it down and into the corridor below. The crying continued, faint but persistent, and they pursued it along hallways and up and down staircases, past closed doors and open rooms where the furniture stood shrouded in dustcovers. There was utter silence except for the occasional burst of weeping, always somewhere in front of them, and the only light came in around the sides of the heavy draperies, closed to protect the carpets and furniture from the sun.

“I don’t like it here,” Belinda said in hushed tones.

Olivia had to admit that it was a gloomy, eerie place, where one could easily imagine things jumping out at one. She was growing increasingly uneasy, yet still she pressed on, determined to track down the source of the weeping.

It led them up the stairs again and into another of the cramped hallways under the roof. They hurried along the corridor, the crying floating in front of them, and turned a sharp corner. Something drifted over their faces, clinging and unseen. They shrieked and
jumped back, clawing at their hair and faces where it still clung.

“A cobweb!” Olivia gasped, disgust mingling with fright in her shaking voice.

“Let’s go back!” Belinda cried, frantically trying to remove all traces of the cobweb.

Olivia took Belinda’s hand firmly and started down the hall, listening, waiting for the crying to start again. They reached another set of stairs and stopped. There was no crying. Olivia and Belinda glanced at each other. The minutes seemed to stretch agonizingly in silence.

“It’s gone,” Olivia said at last, her voice dropping with disappointment. “Blast! We’ve lost it.”

She turned and opened the door nearest her and looked in. It was empty. She stepped across the hall and opened the next door. There was a rickety narrow bed, several of its slats broken and with no mattress. She opened several other doors in close proximity to the stairs and found all the rooms empty or close to it. There was certainly no sign of a person.

Olivia sighed. Whoever had been leading them did not appear to be hiding nearby. She—or he—had probably slipped quietly down the staircase, and there was no telling where the person was by now.

“I suppose we might as well return now,” she said.

“Yes. Let’s.” Belinda glanced first one way down the hall and then the other. “Which way is that?”

“You don’t know?” Olivia asked, a little surprised.

“No. I don’t really know this part of the house. It
has been shut off forever, and Mama would never let us play here, because she was afraid we would get lost. Anyway, it was always sort of…scary, really. It’s so empty and quiet.”

It certainly was that, Olivia had to agree. She, too, looked up and down the hall. “I don’t think I could retrace our steps. We’ve gone up and down and turned down this corridor, then that, so much that I’m completely lost.”

“But we have to get back,” Belinda protested, panic rising in her voice. “It’s getting dark. There’s nothing lit in this part of the house, and when the sun goes down—”

“I know.” Olivia tried to sound reassuring. It was already getting quite dim; she didn’t suppose that it would be long before darkness fell completely, and then they would be trapped wherever they happened to be, unable to find their way out without light. She wished that she had thought to light a candle to bring with her, but, of course, in the heat of pursuit, it had never occurred to her.

“First thing,” she told Belinda, taking her hand, “is to go downstairs. These attic corridors are the worst. There are more windows downstairs, so we’ll have more light, and if we go to the ground floor, we can find a door that goes outside. That will be the simplest way to get back—just walk around to the main wing.”

Belinda brightened at that idea, and they went down the narrow stairs to the very bottom. They
struck out along one hall, only to find that it ended in a wall. There was a window, however, and they tugged aside the heavy curtains to let in the light. There was not much of it, for they could see that the sun had slipped behind the trees. Soon it would disappear altogether.

“We must be on the west side of the house,” Olivia ventured.

Belinda, looking out the window, nodded. “Yes. We’re as far as we can get from the main wing. But I’m pretty sure there’s an outside door on this side of the house—and one or two in back, as well. Some old St. Leger—I think it was during the restoration—loved building things, and he kept adding on wings and halls and rooms. And that was after
his
father had already added on to the place.”

They retraced their steps down the hall, and at the next intersecting hallway took a right, assuming that it would lead them to the rear of the house. It led, in fact, only to another corridor. They turned left and kept walking, and at last came to a closed door at the end of the hall. When they turned the knob, however, it would not open.

“It’s locked!” Olivia and Belinda looked at each other in consternation. There was no convenient key in the keyhole beneath the knob.

“I suppose they would lock the outside doors,” Belinda said. “They wouldn’t want people to be able to come in at will.”

“No, I guess not.” Olivia frowned, thinking. “They are probably all locked.”

“We can’t be sure.”

“No, but we don’t want to waste all of the daylight we have left trying to find the outside doors. It would probably be best to find our way back into the main house.” She thought for a moment. “All right. We shall look out the windows of a room, and we can orient ourselves in relation to the rest of the house. For instance, if we are looking out on the south lawn, we will know we have to go to our left, because the main wing is east of us, right?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

They did as she said, going into the nearest room and pulling aside the drapes from one window. Belinda, peering out, declared they were, indeed, looking out on the side garden, south of the wing they were in and also west of part of the main wing.

They set off down the corridor briskly, for it was almost dark in the hallways now, even though they paused to open any drapes they found along the way. Dusk had fallen outside, and in here, they were increasingly unable to see. Their steps slowed, and even so, they ran into a small table in the hall before they realized they were on it. Olivia put her fingers lightly against the wall as they continued forward, walking ever more hesitantly.

“We won’t find it before dark,” Belinda said, her voice trembling.

“Perhaps not,” Olivia agreed, keeping her voice
firm. “But when we literally cannot see, we will sit down and wait. It isn’t as if we’re in the middle of the woods. We have shelter. The worst is that we’ll be a little hungry and thirsty.”

“Yes, but it scares me. I mean, when you can’t see anything…and I keep thinking of that crying. What if it comes back? I wish we’d never tried to find it. What if it can’t be found? What if it’s something we can’t see?”

“I am sure it was a person,” Olivia said flatly. They had come to a complete stop. There was not any light to see to walk anymore. The enveloping blackness was rather frightening, she had to admit. She would have felt much more comfortable with a candle or two.

Olivia slid her hand along the wall and felt the recess, then wood, that meant a door. “Look, we’ve come to a room. We could go inside it and open the draperies, and then we wouldn’t be totally in the dark. There would be the moonlight and starlight.”

She turned the knob and opened the door. It was pitch-black inside. The draperies must have covered the windows completely, with no gaps, so that not even whatever faint light of stars and moon might be outside could filter in. They gazed into the empty blackness. Olivia could not ignore the shiver that ran down her spine. She closed the door.

“I think I’d rather be out here,” Belinda whispered.

“I would, as well.” They carefully edged past the door. “Shall we sit down?”

“I’m awfully tired.”

They slid down the wall to sit on the floor. Olivia tried not to think about the years’ accumulation of dust that might be on the floor. She was also trying not to think of such things as rats and mice that might frequent an unused building. The list of what she should not think about was growing rapidly as her mind lit first on the weeping sound they had followed, then went to the silent woman she had seen walking across the great hall the other night. What would she do if she saw that woman again here, without Stephen by her side or even a candle to light the corridor?

She cleared her throat, more to make noise in the silence than anything else. “We are not alone,” she said firmly, not quite sure whether she was reassuring Belinda or herself. “We have each other.”

“Thank heavens.” Belinda shuddered.

“And your mother knows that we went off to find the crying. She will tell Stephen and the others. They will start looking for us when we don’t come back.”

“But they won’t know where we are. We could have gone outside or—or vanished.” She said the last word in a hushed voice, as if speaking it aloud somehow gave it reality.

“I don’t think Stephen will assume we have vanished,” Olivia said dryly.

Belinda laughed lightly. “No, that’s true. Stephen
will not think that the ghosts have taken us. We can count on him.”

“Yes. And I think they will search the house before they assume we went outdoors, as well. After all, we heard the sound inside. Surely, after a while, they are bound to realize that we might have wandered over into this wing of the house.”

Belinda nodded. Olivia could feel her straightening beside her. “Of course they will. They will find us.”

It was then that they heard the rapping.

The knocks were short and fast and came from above them. The hair on the back of Olivia’s neck stood up. For an instant neither of them spoke or moved. Indeed, Olivia thought she did not even breathe. Belinda’s hand squeezed convulsively around Olivia’s. There was silence, and then, just as Olivia began to relax, there came another noise—distant and faint and eerily like a voice.

For an instant Olivia was enveloped in a primitive terror. Then reason reasserted itself, and she jumped to her feet.

“Here!” she shouted, her voice ringing out shockingly loud in the dark. “We are here!”

“Olivia!” Belinda shrieked, rising up, too, in agitation. “No! Don’t draw it to us!”

“It’s not ghosts, Belinda.” Olivia cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted again. “Stephen! We are here!”

“What?”

“It is Stephen! Come to rescue us,” Olivia ex
plained. “I’m sure it is. That knocking we heard was simply him walking across the floor above our heads, and then I heard a voice. If we hadn’t gotten into a such a state of fear, we would have realized it. It’s not ghosts, just people searching for us.”