Secrets in the Shadows

Nicky straightened up for a moment and knelt above her. He looked as though he was about to say something, and Louisa felt relief flooding through her, mixing with the wine and sadness already coursing through her blood. But then Nicky lurched towards her again, even more fiercely this time. Louisa heard her dress rip and felt Nicky’s hands grip and burn her waist, and then she felt another pair of hands on her, gentler ones, and she saw Mr Kennedy above her and Hatty’s pale face floating somewhere behind him.

Chapter Eight (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)

Louisa, 1965

The next day, as Hatty and Louisa waited in the reception of The Fortuna Hotel while Mr Kennedy checked them all out two days early, Hatty patted Louisa’s hand.

‘I’m so glad that I brought my dad with me to look for you last night. I had a feeling you’d run into that awful man. I’m just glad that we caught him before he … ’ The sentence skulked away, its content apparently unsuitable for the finery of the hotel’s foyer. ‘I know you’d had a terrible shock, Louisa, and so I don’t blame you for doing something silly. But the thing is, you were quite taken with that man before you’d even found out about your poor father, and it was clear that he was bad news. We were all lucky that nothing worse happened to you last night under that pier. You need to be more careful.’ Hatty saw that her father had finished at the reception desk and was heading towards the girls, so quickly wrapped up what she was saying. ‘You won’t always be lucky enough to have somebody to rescue you.’

Louisa thought of how Dr Barker had rescued her years ago, thought of her father, thought of Mr Kennedy’s gentle grip last night. She looked up from the red swirling carpet, at Hatty’s smooth clean skin and her sleek hair and neat black eyeliner.

The thing about being lucky enough to always have someone to rescue you, she thought, is being unlucky enough to always need rescuing in the first place.

It was as they were waiting for the train back home that Louisa saw her.

She had soft brown hair that hung down over her face, and a rounded jaw just like her mother’s. She stood alone in the midst of all the shrieking groups and families and couples. She held a fashionable rounded suitcase in her hand and her dress was bright, almost garish. She looked, Louisa realised with a creeping nausea, just like her mother would do now. Louisa banged her suitcase down on the platform and raced over to the woman, hearing vague calls from Hatty as she did so. The woman didn’t notice Louisa charging towards her. She stared down the empty platform, lost in her own world: a world that Louisa was certain she had once shared.

As Louisa reached the woman, she slowed down. She tried to stretch out that last glorious moment when anything was still possible for as long as she could by sidling up to her mother gradually. But closer, Louisa could see that she had been mistaken: that the woman’s hair was not soft, but hung in waves that would be sticky to the touch. As she moved closer still, she could smell a dark, exotic perfume. It wasn’t unpleasant. But was it how Louisa had imagined her mother would smell now?

Oh, how Louisa had imagined.

The woman turned, then, and the heavy scent wafted over Louisa, drenching her aching body. All at once, as nausea swept over her and the woman gave her a cool, unknowing glance, Louisa knew: it was not her. With sudden ferocity, the certainty that her mother was dead crashed over Louisa, and all the hot, sharp pain that she had tried to lock away for so many years engulfed her, burning and pinching her whole body. She began to sob: huge, heaving sobs that were too big for her lungs and choked her, twisting air out of her chest and making her shake.

‘Louisa,’ Hatty appeared then, grasping at Louisa’s elbow gently. ‘What are you doing? Our train will be here any minute.’

‘I don’t want to leave,’ Louisa wept.

Hatty took a deep breath, a breath which seemed to say I’ve been expecting this. ‘Darling, I know that the idea of going home must seem a little overwhelming. I know how close you were to your father. But there is so much to sort out, and we’re all going to help you. Once the funeral is over, perhaps we could return to Blackpool, if that’s what you’d like.’

‘But I need to find out what happened to my mother,’ Louisa said, noticing that she was crying. How long had she been crying for? She couldn’t remember.

Hatty’s pretty face crumpled into a frown. ‘Your mother?’

‘Yes. My mother. I lived here in Blackpool with her, before I knew you. She disappeared.’

Hatty’s features blurred with confusion. ‘Louisa, I don’t understand. You’ve never mentioned living in Blackpool before. I thought that your mother was … well, I thought she was dead,’ Hatty finished in a whisper. ‘I’m worried that you’re confused,’ she said finally, her face suddenly snapping back to perfection. She steered Louisa towards Mr and Mrs Kennedy and spoke conspiratorially into their ears. They looked at Louisa with inclined heads and matching frowns.

‘You all think I’m mad, don’t you?’ Louisa wailed. ‘Well, I’m not! My mother disappeared, and I want to know why, and so I need to find the boy with the purple eyes! I know you don’t believe me, and that you think I’m shocked by my father’s death, but the truth is that I knew he’d die, I could see it all in my mind before it happened, and that’s why I came here with you. I knew he’d die after eating his fish supper last night, and I know that the plate he had his fish on will still be in the kitchen stinking the house out when I get home because the maid’s gone now that he has, and I knew that I’d get a visit from the hotel manager, and that I would be wearing my blue dress with the white belt. I knew it all!’

‘Let’s get you home, Louisa,’ Mrs Kennedy said. ‘Here comes the train, see, and we all have a ticket to get on it. Perhaps you could have a little nap when we are settled, and then before you know it—’

‘You’re treating me like a child!’ Louisa screamed.

The station stopped. The people stared, their conversations frozen by the hysterical teenager and the possibility of one last Blackpool spectacle before the dreary trip home. Well, Louisa wouldn’t give it to them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

Mrs Kennedy, her face flushed by the slap of Louisa’s outburst, nodded silently, gesturing for Louisa to step a little closer to the platform; a little further away from her.

And so Louisa didn’t remain in Blackpool that day. She returned to the house on the hill, now hers, and dealt with papers and letters and stiff visits from people her father had known, and finally it was time for his funeral.

The first time Louisa met her father, his face was grey and his hands were grey and his life was grey. But slowly, as Louisa grew and ate side by side with him and walked with him and chattered to him about colours and stories and painted him pictures and asked him questions, he began to have more colour. His cheeks became pink with lively conversation, his hands brown from walking in the sun, and his life coloured in.

Now, as Louisa stood before his imposing coffin, and looked down at his sunken cheeks and that Roman nose she knew so well, and those kind eyes closed in final resignation, she noticed that her father was grey once again.

Things had come full circle.

PART TWO (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)

Chapter Nine (#u029027ba-db43-574a-8e5e-eacb5de5a228)

Rose, 1921

The last heat of the summer had made the train to Blackpool smell of other people’s sweat. Rose could still smell it when they stepped out of the carriage onto the swarming platform. She looked up at the sharp blue sky, wondering if the whole holiday would smell brown and dirty, until her worries were melted away by what she saw.

Past people’s hats, past people’s faces that were blurred from Rose’s jerky movements through the crowds, and up, up in the sky, was the place she had wanted to see for all of her eleven years. It was just as wonderful as the picture her father had shown her: Blackpool Tower stared down at Rose proudly, calm amongst the hullabaloo of the station.

Rose, who had only ever been to Scarborough on her holidays, stared up at the Tower all the way to their hotel. She didn’t look at anything else. She tripped over twice and was scolded by her mother four times for not watching where she was going. But she didn’t care. It would take something very, very special for Rose to want to look anywhere except way up above her, to the tangle of iron crisscrosses that stretched high, high up into the sky, to the beautiful peak that floated in the clouds.

It wasn’t until the middle of her holiday that something very special took Rose’s mind and eyes from Blackpool Tower.

Rose and her parents had been walking along the promenade, from the north to the south, for what felt like a very long time. Rose kept glancing backwards to look into the sky, and every time she did, Blackpool Tower bore down upon her. The crowds of people moved slowly along the promenade, for everybody was gazing at something: the endless roaring sea, or the sands crammed with families, or the fairground rides that soared round and round. The walk to the Pleasure Beach was taking so long that when Rose’s mother spotted a space on a bench, she pulled Rose and her father over to it so that they could all rest their aching legs.

They had been sitting on the bench, the early September sun blazing down on them, for only a few minutes before Rose’s father spotted a friend of his walking by. Rose’s father jumped up and patted his friend heartily on the shoulder as they exclaimed about the chances of spotting each other away on holiday, and Rose’s mother smiled politely at the man’s wife, who wore a fancy yellow hat.

As her parents stood and laughed about things Rose didn’t understand, she stared up at the Tower some more. When the sun began to make tiny white dots on her eyes, and her neck became sore, she dropped her gaze and looked along the colourful promenade that was shining with people. She looked at the green trams and the stalls selling salty seafood. She looked up towards The Pleasure Beach, at the row of hotels opposite a man holding some donkeys, and it was there that she spotted the door.

A tiny handwritten sign above it made every little hair on Rose’s body stand on end in excitement.

Gypsy Sarah. Fortunes Told Here.

Rose knew that her mother would scold and her father would frown if she moved from her spot on the bench, but something inside Rose made her stand and wander over to the door. The door was blue, which was Rose’s third favourite colour. Rose pushed at it, wanting to know what was behind it so much that her insides seemed to quiver a little as it gave way.

Colours and shapes that Rose had never seen before in her quiet Yorkshire life dangled and jingled behind that door. And amongst all the purples and pinks and golds and crystals and gems sat the oldest woman Rose had ever seen.

Gypsy Sarah’s crinkled face puckered as she saw Rose hovering in the doorway.

‘Are you here for a reading?’ she whispered, gesturing to Rose with a hand that looked as though it was made of the brown paper Rose’s dresses were sometimes wrapped in when they were new.

Rose tore her gaze away from Gypsy Sarah, and turned to see her mother and father still deep in conversation with the people near the bench. She could quite possibly have her fortune told before her parents even noticed that she’d gone.

She turned back to the room. ‘Yes, please,’ she answered quietly, her words flying out amongst the exotic colours.

Rose knew little about fortune tellers: she knew little about anything. She did not expect her life’s story to be told, or for Gypsy Sarah to smell of a strange combination of burning wood and lavender and raw meat, or for her hands to be grabbed and squeezed, or for Gypsy Sarah to cry out in a scratchy voice:

‘You must find the boy with purple eyes, for he will give you your life! He will give you a gift!’

‘A gift?’ Rose asked, intrigued and wide-eyed.