Gerry struggled to haul himself out after her, and just for a second, while his hands were too busy to threaten her, she considered doing the job for him: at least then it would be her choice. One glance over the parapet was enough to change her mind. She recoiled in horror, but he caught her by the hair and forced her to look again, and she thought she was going to faint as the terrace below seemed to rise up to meet her. She twisted her head to the side, and there was the chair, covered in snow and facing out to sea, its stone seat hanging perilously over the precipice. Quietly, she began to whimper like an animal. ‘I can’t, Gerry. Please don’t make me.’
But in one swift movement he turned her round and half pushed, half lifted her onto the wall. She grabbed at his hands, pleading with him not to let her fall, but somehow she was on the chair. The stone felt solid at her back, but it was wet and icy cold. She couldn’t bring herself to look down. ‘So how does it feel?’ he asked, his hands holding her tight around the waist. ‘Is power all it’s cracked up to be?’
‘Just get me off here,’ she begged. ‘I’ll do anything you want me to, anything at all, but please get me down.’
He laughed, momentarily easing his grip, and for a moment she thought he was going to leave her there, but then he put his hands under her arms and began to pull her round, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Rachel was glad of his strength. She drew her knees up and tried to get a purchase on the parapet with her feet, but the ledge was slippery and she felt herself falling back. In that split-second, before he pulled her to safety, she saw a fear in Gerry’s eyes which was every bit as great as her own, and something shifted between them – something that had nothing to do with superstition or St Michael or an ancient piece of stone, but with the sudden realisation that she had the power to hurt him, too.
10
‘Your room or mine?’ Marta asked, as they walked down the Long Passage to go to bed. ‘I know I’ve got the Christmas decorations, but there’s something very tempting about the four-poster bed.’
‘Whichever is warmer,’ Josephine said, rubbing her hands together. ‘It was freezing in that drawing room. The only time I’ve been warm since we got here was sitting in front of your fire.’
‘All right. You come to me.’
‘It’s probably better that way round. I’m right next to the Lancasters and the Hartleys, and all you’ve got on your corridor are the missing Mrs Carmichael and two bathrooms.’
‘Just how much noise are you planning to make?’
‘I meant there’ll be less chance of being seen.’ She blushed, and returned Marta’s smile. ‘I hope Mrs Carmichael’s all right.’
‘Yes, so do I. With a bit of luck, she’ll be here tomorrow if the weather calms down.’
‘Have you brought an alarm clock? I need to be back in my room by eight to be woken up.’
‘I don’t even own an alarm clock.’
‘Then I’ll bring one. I’ll go and fetch what I need now, and come back when I’m sure everyone else has stopped moving about.’
‘All right. Don’t be long.’
Back in her room, Josephine found her nightclothes already laid out on the bed. Feeling guilty for wasting Mrs Pendean’s time, she scooped them up into a bag ready to take with her, then waited by the fire until she was sure that the staff had finished their reign of terror for the night. The snow had brought with it a vast, muffled silence, amplifying the noises in the castle’s passageways. She heard people saying goodnight in subdued tones, then a voice that sounded like Hilaria’s calling something down the corridor about the carol service. Footsteps passed repeatedly outside in a flurry of trips to the bathroom, followed by a sequence of closing doors and a man’s loud cough; eventually, the house fell quiet. Josephine left her room, resisting the schoolgirl urge to put a bolster in the bed, and hurried down the dimly lit corridor.
She turned the corner and bumped straight into Angela Hartley, and it was hard to say who was the more surprised as each of their wash bags clattered to the floor. The vicar’s wife looked older without her make-up, an impression only emphasised by her pale mauve dressing gown and the anxiety etched deeply on her face. ‘I’m sorry to startle you,’ Josephine said, when her own heart had slowed a little. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ Mrs Hartley said, with an artificial certainty that implied exactly the opposite. ‘I was just trying to find my room. It’s silly of me, but …’ She tailed off, looking bewildered, and Josephine knelt down to gather up the soaps and toothbrushes that had been dropped, restoring everything to its rightful bag and noticing that the hem of Mrs Hartley’s dressing gown was soaking wet, as if she had been outside in the snow. ‘Richard went to speak to someone, you see, and I was waiting to say goodnight to him, but he was longer than he said he’d be, so I went to the bathroom while he was gone. I thought I knew how to get back, but now I’ve no idea where I am.’
‘It’s not silly at all,’ Josephine said. ‘I’ve been lost myself so many times today. One corridor looks much the same as the next in a strange house, especially when it’s as big as this one.’
Mrs Hartley smiled, grateful for the reassurance, and Josephine gestured back the way she had come. ‘I think your room is near mine. Shall we try down here?’
She led the way, relieved not to have to explain what she was doing in a completely different part of the castle, and they were soon outside the vicar’s door. ‘My husband’s gone to speak to someone,’ Mrs Hartley repeated, ‘so at least he won’t have been worrying about me. Thank you, my dear. You’ve been very kind.’
‘Not at all. See you in the morning.’ She waited until the vicar’s wife had gone back into her room, then retraced her footsteps yet again along the corridor. The lull in the wind should have been soothing, but the sudden quiet was somehow more unsettling, and Josephine was glad when it was filled by a peal of now familiar laughter. She paused, then took a short detour to the corridor that Archie shared with Marlene, stopping outside the film star’s door. Marlene was talking, although the words were indistinct, and every now and again a man’s voice, low and muffled, said something in response. Smiling to herself at the thought that Archie’s Christmas had arrived an hour before everybody else’s, she made her way to Marta’s room.
11
Never in all her life had Nora been so grateful to finish a shift. The blizzards had blown themselves out by the time she left the castle, but the sea was still high, and she could hear the familiar dull thud of boats knocking against the harbour wall as she made her way down to the village. The Mount’s dense canopy of fir trees had protected the higher paths from the worst of the snow, but by the time she reached the old dairy, any shelter had dwindled and the only thing in front of her was a vast lawn of white, exposed and radiant under a three-quarter moon. Something in its cleanness saddened her.
She walked through snow that was two or three inches thick, and felt it begin to soak into her boots as she neared the bottom of the slope. Most of the village houses were gathered together in two terraces that ran parallel with the south wall of the harbour, and all were in darkness except for her own. The lights were confined to the downstairs rooms, and she knew that Tom would be waiting up for her; it must be Christmas Day by now, and he would want to mark it with her, this year more than ever. Nora forced herself on, listening to the whisper of powdery snow beneath her feet. Their cottage was at the end of the row, near the lodge house, and she put her hand on the back gate to let herself into the tiny yard, knowing that Tom would have cleared a path to the door for her. The thought stopped her abruptly in her tracks, a reminder of the love that she had betrayed tugging insistently at her conscience, and suddenly she knew that she simply couldn’t bring herself to go home. It was like a physical paralysis, an inability to walk in through the back door and call to her husband as she always did, to pretend that everything was normal. In that instant, Nora realised that she had lost the right to belong in her own life; regardless of how worried she knew Tom would be, she turned and walked away.