The Mystery of Wickworth Manor (11 page)

‘Fine. We need more info anyway. And I won’t say a thing. My lips are sealed. Nothing but silence.’

‘Well, shh then.’

Curtis circled out over the lawn, moving towards the house.

Paige gave one last look at the lake. Tiny, choppy waves lapped at the canoes; ripples spread in circles where fish broke through to the surface. What had happened here? Was this where the Boy and his love met?

‘Hey, Paige,’ Curtis shouted.

He stood at the side of the house. Even from this distance, she could make out the movement of the dowsing sticks. She ran over to him.

‘I think, I’m not sure, but I think, they want me to go this way. They twitch when I point at the house.’

‘Well, follow them then!’ Paige said.

He led the way. Each careful step he took, he would pause and wait for a response from the rods.

Paige had to bite her tongue, to stop herself telling him to get a move on.

He moved around the side of the house, past the kitchen door. They were back in the courtyard. A group of children with their faces painted blue and green clattered past them. Sal was one of them. Paige caught her eye and raised an eyebrow.

‘Ancient Celts,’ Sal said and shrugged.

‘Oh,’ Paige said. Made perfect sense. She gave a little wave and hurried up after Curtis. He crossed the cobbled yard and stood in front of the Art Barn.

‘My subconscious wants us to go in there,’ he said.

The barn was empty. Somehow, without the movement and sound of people around it, the wicker globe looked even bigger. Some of it was covered in green and blue tissue and coloured light fell through like stained glass. The room was warm and smelled of glue and paper dust.

Curtis looked down at his hands. The sticks were crossing rapidly like chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘It’s an amazing phenomenon; the motive power of auto-suggestion.’

‘What?’

‘It means my mind can make stuff move. There’s a perfectly rational explanation.’

‘Then why do you look so worried?’ It was true. There was a tremor in his voice as though he was a tiny bit scared of what he was seeing.

‘I’m not worried. I’m simply fascinated by my brain’s ability to dupe my body. It isn’t worry.’

‘Well, it’s doing a very good impression.’

Curtis rolled his eyes.

‘Where does it want you to go?’ Paige asked, leaning in to look at his hands.

‘I don’t know. How can I tell?’

Paige looked at him. There was no sarcasm now, just interest and a tiny touch of fear. She smiled. ‘It’s OK. Just let your mind clear. Don’t try too hard. All he needs is for you to listen. He’ll tell you where to go.’

Curtis stepped into the centre of the room, then veered right. He followed a side wall. There was a small flight of steps, more like a ladder, really, tucked into the far corner. It was made of slats of wood, worn in the centre by hundreds of years’ worth of footsteps. A handrail ran up against the stone wall, but there were no railings or banister on the other side.

‘Here?’ Paige whispered.

‘I guess so.’

Curtis led the way, holding the dowsing rods in front of him and using his elbow against the wall to keep his balance. Paige gripped the handrail. The steps creaked as they climbed.

They were just below a wide ledge.

Miles above the main room.

Paige stopped.

‘What is it?’ Curtis asked.

‘Nothing.’ Her heartbeat quickened and her knees felt as though they were filling up with jelly. ‘But I’m not coming any further.’

The ledge was wider than a shelf, but not by much. And there was nothing along the edge to stop a person from falling and cracking their head open on the floor below. Paige pressed her shoulder blades against the wall. The solid stone against her back made her feel a bit calmer. But there was no way she was going any higher.

‘Is there anything up there?’ she asked. Her voice sounded squeaky, like a mouse with its tail trapped in a door.

Curtis moved on to the ledge and poked around. It creaked under his weight.

Paige took a deep breath and tried not to think about the drop. From where she stood, she could just make out a few cardboard boxes and a sack made of some brown rough-looking stuff.

‘I don’t think so. I can’t see anything interesting.’ Paige heard rustling as he moved some things around. ‘No, nothing. It’s just art supplies.’ Curtis appeared at the top of the steps. ‘I can’t see anyth—’ He paused. He was looking out at the room below. His eyes scanned the walls and the roof, then the walls again.

‘What?’

‘This room. Look.’ He pointed. ‘There are marks where walls used to be. This room wasn’t always one big space.’

Paige looked. She could see what he meant. There were lines of brick running vertically along the main wall about three metres apart. It looked as though once upon a time there had been lots of small walls breaking up the main space. But she wasn’t sure why the Boy would want them to look at rows of bricks. ‘So what?’ she asked.

‘Look how far apart the walls were. I bet that if we looked at an old plan of this place we’d see that the Art Barn used to be a stables. The portrait shows him in livery. This is where the coach boy worked. This room is where he lived.’

Paige gasped. She could see it now, the ghost of the stables that were so long gone. She could smell the tang of horses and hear hooves on earth. The light seemed to dim and the whisper of straw grew in her ears to a roar. Paige felt her back scrape down the wall, grazing her spine.

‘Paige? Are you all right?’ Curtis was beside her.

‘I . . . I feel funny.’

‘Was it the height again?’

Paige felt his arms lifting her up. She was half walked, half carried back to the ground. He dropped her in a chair. She let her head fall down to her knees and breathed slowly until the sick feeling in her stomach passed. ‘Curtis,’ she whispered. ‘We’re close to something. I can feel it. Get the dowsing rods, quickly.’

‘But, you’re not well, we should –’

‘Quickly. It’s important.’

She sensed rather than saw him go back up the stairs and snatch up the sticks he’d dropped. Then he was back at her side.

‘Do you want to do it?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘No. There’s something here with us, right now. It’s all around us. You can do it. The Boy is here.’

The skin on her arms tingled. There was an energy in the room that was almost scalding her. The air was charged with it; the particles of dust danced like moving crystals. ‘Do it now!’ she said.

Curtis swam before her eyes. She had a horrible feeling that she might faint. She focused on his hands, pulling them into view. He gripped the sticks tightly, his knuckles looked almost grey. He thrust them out in front of him and waited. For a second they were still, then they twitched. They flipped and flailed in his hands as though they were alive. They
were
alive in a way, channelling a life that had been and was lost.

Curtis cried out, in surprise and shock. He was wrenched forwards, his arms lunged out as though he was holding a sword.

There was an awful tearing sound.

The sticks in Curtis’s hands had pierced through the thin film of tissue glued to the wicker frame. Two small rips, like eyeholes in a mask, cut through the ocean.

Curtis stepped back. The sticks clattered to the ground. ‘I didn’t mean to do that. Why would I do that?’

‘It isn’t you, it’s the Wickworth Boy. He wanted you to do that. He’s trying to tell us something.’

‘But it
was
me, wasn’t it? I was the one holding the sticks. And look what I did! Look at it! I’ve ruined it.’

Paige stood up and stepped over. Her head felt clearer now. ‘It isn’t ruined. It will glue back,’ she said softly. ‘We have to think about what this means.’

‘No!’ Curtis stepped away from her. ‘This has gone far enough. I’m not doing this your way any more. I found out more in twenty minutes in the library than I did in days of
this
.’ He waved at the sticks on the floor. ‘Whatever happened here, it was just suggestion and wishful thinking and you seeing things that are just not there.’ He turned to leave. ‘If you want me, I will be doing
proper
research.’ Then he was gone.

Chapter 22

The library would be the best place to go. Curtis rubbed his hands on his jeans, desperate to get rid of the impression of the sticks. But the horrible, twitching sensation remained, like holding invisible fish. He stalked across the courtyard towards the house. He passed the kitchen door. It smelled like lasagne. Food. Maybe he needed food. It might calm him down a bit. He nipped through into the refectory.

‘Hello, Carol,’ he said. ‘Could I have something to take away, please? It’s a low blood sugar emergency.’

Carol raised an eyebrow. ‘Does this look like McDonalds? I thought you were going to get to know some people. You shouldn’t scuttle off like this.’

‘I’m not scuttling, I promise. And I’ve kind of made a friend. But I need to do something important and I won’t have time after lunch.’

Carol sighed. She handed him some bread and cheese and an apple. ‘Will that do? What is it that’s so important?’

‘1805,’ Curtis said. ‘Something happened here that I need to find out about. You don’t know anything about that year?’

Carol chuckled. ‘A bit before my time, love. Before my gran’s time, even. What happened then?’

Curtis slipped the apple into his pocket and folded the bread around the cheese. ‘The people who lived here died. Patience and William Burton.’

‘Oh.’ Carol flashed a glance over his shoulder, checking the rows of tables filling with pupils and teachers. ‘Good. Mrs Burton-Jones isn’t here yet. She doesn’t like people nosing about the place, you know. She’s a very private person. A bit sensitive about having to let strangers into the old place. To be honest, if the heating bills here weren’t so astronomical, there’s no way she’d let you lot over the threshold.’

‘Does that mean you do know something about Patience and William?’ Curtis leaned in close.

‘Not much. But I do know that it was considered a real tragedy. Patience died first, then her father. The place went to the elder sister after that. She was a bitter, miserable old thing. When she died it went to her cousin. That’s who my gran worked for. There were parties here all the time after that. Gran told me about some of the things those young gents got up to . . . well . . . never mind.’

‘Is there anywhere I could look, if I wanted to find out more about Patience?’

Carol picked up a cloth and started wiping down the surface. ‘I don’t know, love. When they turned this place into an activity centre lots of the old stuff got packed away. I’ve no idea where it would be. Shoved in a box in an attic, I shouldn’t wonder.’

A shock wave ran right down through Curtis from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. A box in an attic!

‘Thanks, Carol,’ he said. He turned and rushed out of the hall, to the main staircase, then he pounded up as fast as he could run. Right to the top of the house, to his room: an attic filled with boxes.

He dashed open the curtains, showering the room with dust. Then he pulled the lids off cardboard archive boxes and tugged open filing cabinets. Everything was stuffed full of paper; yellowing reams of typed A4; old-fashioned printouts with perforated edges; sepia photographs of long-dead people. There was no order to any of it. He pulled out a few pieces of paper from one of the boxes and glanced at them: an architect’s drawing from 1981; a list of players in the village cricket eleven from 1948; a bill for groceries delivered in 1912.

He sat down in the middle of the floor and tugged the nearest box closer.

The painting, resting against the bed frame where Paige had left it last night, now had a thin layer of dust on it.

He bit into his cheese sandwich and started pulling paper out, one sheet at a time. He chewed slowly, laying out patches and snippets of the house’s history on the floor. The box was two-thirds empty when he saw something that made him gasp.