I Shall Wear Midnight

Keepsake Hall was at the far end of the Chalk, and it was truly the far end of the Chalk because there the chalk gave way to clay and gravel. There was parkland here, and tall trees – forests of them – and fountains in front of the house itself, which stretched the word ‘hall’ to breaking point, since it looked like half a dozen mansions stuck together. There were outbuildings, wings, a large ornamental lake, and a weathervane in the shape of a heron, which Tiffany nearly ran into. ‘How many people live here?’ she managed to say as she steadied the stick and landed on what she had expected to be a lawn but turned out to be dried grass almost five feet deep. Rabbits scattered, alarmed at the aerial intrusion.

‘Just me and Mother now,’ said Letitia, the dead grass crackling under her feet as she jumped down, ‘and the servants, of course. We have quite a lot of them. Don’t worry, they will all be in bed by now.’

‘How many servants do you need for two people?’ Tiffany asked.

‘About two hundred and fifty.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

Letitia turned as she led the way to a distant door. ‘Well, including families, there’s about forty on the farm and another twenty in the dairy, and another twenty-four for working in the woodlands, and seventy-five for the gardens, which include the banana house, the pineapple pit, the melon house, the water-lily house and the trout fishery. The rest work in the house and the pension rooms.’

‘What are they?’

Letitia stopped with her hand on the corroded brass doorknob. ‘You think my mother is a very rude and bossy person, don’t you?’

Tiffany couldn’t see any alternative to telling the truth, even at the risk of midnight tears. She said, ‘Yes, I do.’

‘And you are right,’ said Letitia, turning the doorknob. ‘But she is loyal to people who are loyal to us. We always have been. No one is ever sacked for being too old or too ill or too confused. If they can’t manage in their cottages, they live in one of the wings. In fact, most of the servants are looking after the old servants! We may be oldfashioned and a bit snobbish and behind the times, but no one who works for the Keepsakes will ever need to beg for their food at the end of their life.’

At last the cranky doorknob turned, opening into a long corridor that smelled of … that smelled of … that smelled of old. That was the only way to describe it, but if you had enough time to think, you would say it was a mix of dry fungi, damp wood, dust, mice, dead time and old books, which have an intriguing smell of their own. That was it, Tiffany decided. Days and hours had died quietly in here while nobody noticed.

Letitia fumbled on a shelf inside the door, and lit a lamp. ‘No one ever comes in here these days except me,’ she said, ‘because it’s haunted.’

‘Yes,’ said Tiffany, trying to keep her voice matter-of-fact. ‘By a headless lady with a pumpkin under her arm. She is walking towards us right now.’

Had she expected shock? Or tears? Tiffany certainly hadn’t expected Letitia to say, ‘That would be Mavis. I shall have to change her pumpkin as soon as the new ones are ripe. They start to get all, well, manky after a while.’ She raised her voice. ‘It’s only me, Mavis, nothing to be frightened of!’

With a sound like a sigh, the headless woman turned and began to walk back up the corridor.

‘The pumpkin was my idea,’ Letitia continued chattily. ‘She was just impossible to deal with before that. Looking for her head, you know? The pumpkin gives her some comfort, and frankly I don’t think she knows the difference, poor soul. She wasn’t executed, by the way. I think she wants everybody to know that. It was simply a freak accident involving a flight of stairs, a cat and a scythe.’

And this is the girl who spends all her time in tears, thought Tiffany. But this is her place. Aloud, she said, ‘Any more ghosts to show me, just in case I want to wet myself again?’

‘Well, not now,’ said Letitia, setting off along the corridor. ‘The screaming skeleton stopped screaming when I gave him an old teddy bear, although I’m not certain why that worked and, oh yes, the ghost of the first duke now sticks to haunting the lavatory next to the dining room, which we don’t use very often. He has a habit of pulling the chain at inconvenient moments, but that’s better than the rains of blood we used to have.’

‘You are a witch.’ The words came out of Tiffany’s mouth all by themselves, unable to stay in the privacy of her mind.

The girl looked at her in astonishment. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘We both know how it goes, don’t we? Long blonde hair, milk-white skin, noble – well, a reasonably noble birth – and rich, at least technically. I’m officially a lady.’