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“Spiders,” he says, with a slightly camp shiver. “Everywhere. I’ve got a phobia.”
She nods. “You know, when I was at the historical place today, in the village, I read in a book that this house was built on cursed land.”
Sebastian sighs, heavily. “Yes…so I’ve been told. Although not until after I’d paid full price for the place.” He snorts, derisively. “Well, I can’t say it surprises me much. This house does feel cursed sometimes.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, you know, everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and the electrics are insane.”
Jessica gestures to the stairway. “Can I— Is it okay if I take a look?”
“Yeah, be my guest. For what it’s worth. There’s not a lot down there. Well, according to my girlfriend, at least.”
“She’s not scared of spiders, then?”
“No. I can’t say she’s scared of anything, to be honest. She’s quite formidable.”
He smiles at her encouragingly and Jessica descends the narrow stairs, circling her way down into the cellar. She uses the flashlight on her phone to light up the interior.
As Sebastian said, nothing down here. A smooth concrete floor, water pipes, a blank canvas.
But then she catches something else. Something dark, something electric in the air. It fizzes in her veins, it makes her hairs stand on end. Looking down at the concrete base, she sees holes drilled through it. She crouches and puts her hands to the holes, feels inside them with her fingers; they’re smooth inside, not too dirty, so newly drilled. Must be something to do with controlling the damp, she surmises, before getting back to standing.
“What did you say this space was for?” she calls up to Sebastian.
“I have no idea. I mean, I suppose it must have been used for storage at one time. But now it’s just a place to keep water pipes. If I wasn’t so scared to go down there, I could use it for wine storage. Or a gym. Maybe even put in a home cinema.”
Jessica arcs the flashlight one more time around the empty space, shudders, and then heads back up to the kitchen.
“See any ghosts?” Sebastian asks as she reappears.
“No,” she says. “No spiders either. Looks immaculate. Have you had some work done down there?”
“Just some plumbing. A water pump for the fancy rainfall showers my girlfriend told me to get installed upstairs. Apparently we have to have rainfall showers, otherwise we’re basically Neanderthals.” He shrugs, then leads her back into the hallway and up a sweeping flight of stairs to what he refers to as a minstrels’ gallery above. It’s built from barley twists of ebonized wood, and all around the gallery are ornately carved black doors.
“Seven bedrooms,” he says, gesturing at the many doors. “Only three renovated so far. Mine, and of course…” He opens a door to a pair of adjoining rooms with bowed leaded windows overlooking the manicured lawns at the back of the house. “The precious offspring.”
“Nice,” says Jessica, caressing the footboard of an oversized rose-pink padded velvet bed.
“Yes. I had to get these rooms ready first, of course. No way would those kids countenance staying in subpar accommodation.”
“Well, you have great taste, I have to say.”
“Ah,” he says, “that’ll be my girlfriend again. Although my daughter, Lark, did keep referring to this bed as her ‘big butt cheek’ bed, so I’m not sure it was entirely to her taste.”
Jessica lets out a burst of laughter and then asks to use the bathroom. Sebastian opens a door to reveal a shared en suite between the kids’ rooms, which he refers to as a Jack and Jill bathroom. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says. “See you downstairs.”
Jessica waits by the bathroom door until she hears the creak of Sebastian’s footsteps on the staircase and then she opens Lark’s wardrobe—a couple of hoodies hanging lonesome, a pair of scuffed-up sneakers on the floor, on one shelf a half-used bottle of cheap perfume called Brazilian Crush alongside scrunched-up T-shirts, and on another a bra with unfeasibly tiny cups. She falls to her hands and knees and peers under the huge velvet bed. Socks. A phone charging cable. Hair ties. She opens and closes several drawers, then peers behind the curtains and pulls up the cushion on the window seat there, finds nothing but fluff and hair and a bobby pin.
She goes through the bathroom and into Fox’s room and carries out another search. Finding similar teenage detritus, she is about to give up and return downstairs when she notices something on the floor under a desk. It’s a sketch on a scrap of paper of what looks like a small child bursting through the earth with arms raised up toward the beams of the sun. Underneath the sketch is the word Miranda.
Her head explodes with the memory of Fox on the landing outside the bathroom at the Bleeding Heart talking up to the ceiling and then Malcolm’s report earlier about Fox’s strange oration on the streets of New York.
Miranda? she thinks. Who the hell is Miranda?
She tucks the sketch into her jacket pocket and heads back down to Sebastian.
EIGHTEEN
